In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United
States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally
reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the
place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth
century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake
research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available
Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as
archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United
States.
Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that
occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse,
symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were
critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he
argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating
vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade
in America's image.
Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American
rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese
actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of
colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were
profoundly implicated in--and ultimately transcended--the dynamics
of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations.