Confronting Vietnam
Subtitle: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963 (Cold War International History Project)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Stanford University Press; Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford University Press [distributor]
Published: March 20, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 286
ISBN-13: 9780804747127
Subjects: Asian history: Vietnam War; European history: postwar, from c 1945 -; International relations; Warfare & Defence; Postwar period, 1945 to c 2000; History - General History; Foreign relations; History; Vietnam War, 1961-1975; History: World; Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe); Russia; Vietnam; Asia - Southeast Asia; Europe - Russia & the Former Soviet Union; History & Theory - General; History / Southeast Asia; 1953-1975; Indochina; Soviet Union; Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975
Description: "Based on extensive research in the Russian archives, this book examines the Soviet approach to the Vietnam conflict between the 1954 Geneva conference on Indochina and late 1963, when the overthrow of the South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and the assassination of John F. Kennedy radically transformed the conflict.".

"The author finds that the USSR attributed no geostrategic importance to Indochina and did not want the crisis there to disrupt detente. Initially, the Russians had high hopes that the Geneva accords would bring years of peace in the region. Gradually disillusioned, they tried to strengthen North Vietnam, but would not support unification of North and South.

By the early 1960s, however, they felt obliged to counter the American embrace of an aggressively anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam and the hostility of its former ally, the People's Republic of China. Finally, Moscow decided to disengage from Vietnam, disappointed that its efforts to avert an international crisis there had failed."--BOOK JACKET.