The Vietnam War still divides Americans. Some claim that Indochina was of no strategic value. Others argue that timid civilian leaders denied the U.S military permission to win. In this paradigm-shifting book, Michael Lind explodes both of these myths and puts the Vietnam War back in the context of Cold War power politics and American domestic politics. The Cold War, Lind argues, was the third world war, and the proxy wars in Korea, Indochina, and Afghanistan were among its major campaigns. However, the cost of the U.S military's misguided tactics in Vietnam undermined American public support for the Cold War on all fronts. The result was the forfeiture of Indochina, a resurgence of American isolationism, and a worldwide wave of Soviet bloc expansion checked only by the Second Cold War of the 1980's. Challenging the stale orthodoxies of the antiwar left and prowar right, VIETNAM: THE NECESSARY WAR offers a major reinterpretation of America's most disastrous foreign war.
- ISBN10 0684870274
- ISBN13 9780684870274
- Publish Date 21 October 2002 (first published 7 August 2000)
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 1 December 2011
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Simon & Schuster
- Imprint The Free Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 336
- Language English