Europe and the Vietnam War

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the Vietnam War has undercut the view, once widely accepted, that President Lyndon Johnson saw no real alternative to escalating the American commitment to Indochina in 1964 and 1965. Above all, historian Fredrik Logevall established in his award-winning 1999 book Choosing War that Johnson clearly heard a chorus of powerful voices urging him to negotiate a withdrawal from Vietnam.1 In choosing to escalate, LBJ spurned advice that, had it been followed, might have spared his nation enormous bloodshed and anguish. If this general point is well established, opportunities nevertheless abound for research into the extent and nature of dissent against Johnson’s decisions for war. Eugenie M. Blang, assistant professor of history at Hampton University, takes up one such promising line of inquiry in Allies at Odds. The book asks why the governments of America’s three most important West European allies—Britain, France, and West Germany—opposed increased U.S. involvement in Vietnam and why they failed to exert more influence over Washington in the critical years from 1961 to 1968. Blang’s answers will not surprise readers well versed in the history of the war or transatlantic relations during the sixties. Moreover, she inevitably covers some of the same ground as previous books on U.S.-British relations in connection with Vietnam, by far the most exhaustively studied of the three cases that Blang examines. Yet Blang makes her mark by going into deeper detail than many previous studies of West European policymaking toward the war and drawing illuminating comparisons among British, French, and West German behavior. For these reasons, the book merits the attention of scholars concerned with diplomatic aspects of America’s war in Vietnam.