Forging A Fateful Alliance
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Forging a Fateful Alliance
Forging A Fateful Alliance is an important study of the Vietnam War and American higher education-- revealing how secret and semi-secret institutional involvement in that conflict led to public disclosures that undermined the integrity of academe. After Indochina's de facto division in 1954, Michigan State University offered South Vietnam an array of technical support as part of the "nation-building" program. This support included developing a viable national public administrative structure and, at the same time, training South Vietnam's notorious military police. In return for these services, the U.S. government provided the university with generous clandestine and open financial remuneration -- money that the university would use to expand academic programs, construct new facilities, and fuel its dramatic growth. In the end, however, the arrangement proved to be a Faustian bargain. Like many universities, MSU was accused of being a tool of Cold War foreign policy, of sending professors abroad to staff grandiose "outreach" programs that were based more on ideology than on scholarship or research. Ultimately, flaws inherent in the nation- building scheme, including its failure to address cultural differences or recognize the massive corruption in South Vietnam's government, foreshadowed the enormity of the tragedy that occurred in Southeast Asia after 1965.
Misalliance
Author: Edward Miller
language: en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date: 2013-04-15
Diem’s alliance with Washington has long been seen as a Cold War relationship gone bad, undone by either American arrogance or Diem’s stubbornness. Edward Miller argues that this misalliance was more than just a joint effort to contain communism. It was also a means for each side to shrewdly pursue its plans for nation building in South Vietnam.
Aid Under Fire
Author: Jessica Elkind
language: en
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Release Date: 2016-06-17
In the aftermath of World War II, as longstanding empires collapsed and former colonies struggled for independence, the United States employed new diplomatic tools to counter unprecedented challenges to its interests across the globe. Among the most important new foreign policy strategies was development assistance—the attempt to strengthen alliances by providing technology, financial aid, and administrators to fledgling states in order to disseminate and inculcate American values and practices in local populations. While the US implemented development programs in several nations, nowhere were these policies more significant than in Vietnam. In Aid Under Fire, Jessica Elkind examines US nation-building efforts in the fledgling South Vietnamese state during the decade preceding the full-scale ground war. Based on American and Vietnamese archival sources as well as on interviews with numerous aid workers, this study vividly demonstrates how civilians from the official US aid agency as well as several nongovernmental organizations implemented nearly every component of nonmilitary assistance given to South Vietnam during this period, including public and police administration, agricultural development, education, and public health. However, despite the sincerity of American efforts, most Vietnamese citizens understood US-sponsored programs to be little more than a continuation of previous attempts by foreign powers to dominate their homeland. Elkind convincingly argues that, instead of reexamining their core assumptions or altering their approach as the violence in the region escalated, US policymakers and aid workers only strengthened their commitment to nation building, increasingly modifying their development goals to support counterinsurgency efforts. Aid Under Fire highlights the important role played by nonstate actors in advancing US policies and reveals in stark terms the limits of American power and influence during the period widely considered to be the apex of US supremacy in the world.