20th century american history
20th century american military history
A01=Gareth Porter
american history
american military history
Author_Gareth Porter
Category=NHF
Category=NHW
Category=NHWL
Category=NHWR9
cold war
cold war doctrine
communism
communist domination
domino effect
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gulf of tonkin
historical
jfk
lbj
military intervention
military power
national security
national security officials
north vietnam
peace negotiations
political
politics
president john f kennedy
president lyndon b johnson
secretary of defense
united states of america
us foreign policy
us policy
vietnam war
warfare
Product details
- ISBN 9780520250048
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 20 Sep 2006
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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"Perils of Dominance" is the first completely new interpretation of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam. It provides an authoritative challenge to the prevailing explanation that U.S. officials adhered blindly to a Cold War doctrine that loss of Vietnam would cause a 'domino effect' leading to communist domination of the area. Gareth Porter presents compelling evidence that U.S. policy decisions on Vietnam from 1954 to mid-1965 were shaped by an overwhelming imbalance of military power favoring the United States over the Soviet Union and China. He demonstrates how the slide into war in Vietnam is relevant to understanding why the United States went to war in Iraq, and why such wars are likely as long as U.S. military power is overwhelmingly dominant in the world. Challenging conventional wisdom about the origins of the war, Porter argues that the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam came not from presidents Kennedy and Johnson but from high-ranking national security officials in their administrations who were heavily influenced by U.S. dominance over its Cold War foes.
Porter argues that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were all strongly opposed to sending combat forces to Vietnam, but that both Kennedy and Johnson were strongly pressured by their national security advisers to undertake military intervention. Porter reveals for the first time that Kennedy attempted to open a diplomatic track for peace negotiations with North Vietnam in 1962 but was frustrated by bureaucratic resistance. Significantly revising the historical account of a major turning point, Porter describes how Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara deliberately misled Johnson in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, effectively taking the decision to bomb North Vietnam out of the president's hands.
Gareth Porter is an independent scholar on issues of war and peace and an historian of the Vietnam conflict. His first book, A Peace Denied, which told the story of the negotiation and implementation of the Paris peace agreement of January 1973, was published in 1975. His analysis of the political system of united Vietnam, Vietnam: The Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism, was published in 1993.
