Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the fate of South Vietnam

摘要

Southeast Asia endured a turbulent political transition from the colonial to the postcolonial order. Nowhere was that turbulence bumpier than in Vietnam. Current Vietnamese orthodoxy defines the conflict the rest of the world calls the Vietnam War as a struggle for national independence from foreign domination that ran from 1930 to 1975. During that protracted conflict, something happened that did not occur anywhere else in the region: a state disappeared from the regional system. Some postcolonial states were artificially forged, i.e. Malaysia. Some were created by irreconcilable differences, vis. the Republic of Singapore. But only the Republic of Vietnam, more commonly known as South Vietnam, did not survive the Cold War and decolonisation periods to take a place in the Southeast Asia of ASEAN. English-language studies of the Vietnam War remain focused, by a large majority, on various aspects of the American experience of that war. It would be wrong to say they ignore the destruction of their ally, but fair to argue that many scholars tended, for a long time, to dismiss South Vietnam in terms that often approached caricature. But times change, passions fade, new generations pose new questions. Literatures evolve. Recent scholarship, challenging an orthodox American interpretation that, broadly speaking, denounced every aspect of the Vietnam experience as avoidable disaster, is now at last complicating our understanding of the Republic of Vietnam. A focal point for that trajectory is the man who created the state, and whose overthrow and assassination marked, to many, the most significant turning point in its story: Ngo Dinh Diem, founding president of the Republic of Vietnam.