Abstract
The literature on U.S. participation in the Vietnam War has recently undergone a quiet revolution due to use of the concept of nation building. Since the early 1950s nation building has been the subtext, if not the excuse, for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, but in the last ten years it has also become useful as a method of inquiry. This article contends that new insights regarding the signi�cance of ideologies and paradigms, particularly modernization theory, enabled the transformation. Understanding modernization theory as an ideology broke with the tradition among diplomatic historians that minimized the role of ideas in policy decisions. It also settled longstanding questions about the nature of paci�cation as either development or counterinsurgency: Counterinsurgency and development were simply different expressions of the same impulse for the United States and the South Vietnamese.
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