Vietnam. Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the fate of South Vietnam. By Edward Miller. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 419. Maps, Photos, Notes, Government Documents, Index.

Abstract

Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the fate of South Vietnam By EDWARD MILLER Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 419. Maps, Photos, Notes, Government Documents, Index. doi: 10.1017/S002246341400023X 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. Edward Miller takes up the challenge to revisit both Diem and the state he led in a volume that, refreshingly, lives up very diligently to its title. This is a critical and admirably dispassionate analysis of Diem and his family, their all-important relationship with the United States and its various agents, and their combined failure to build an effective alliance. One of the few criticisms to make is that the author goes too far in explicitly devoting so much of his main text, and so many citations, to direct rebuttals, or responses, to interpretations, general and particular, presented by both memoirs and historians. This sometimes veers close to distracting the reader from Miller's own argument; admittedly however, some interplay with the literature was necessary. Miller positioned this study as an effort to navigate through controversies that are indeed polarising. Miller rejects familiar arguments that Diem was a fish out of water, running a hopelessly corrupt government with neither legitimacy nor prospects, at any time on any level. He also rejects generally more recent arguments that Diem was in fact an effective strongman winning his war, and his overthrow was a definitive American blunder. Instead Miller presents a nationalist with a broad agenda, one that he had thought through over a long period of time, and that represented a determined effort to blend past and present. …