Maps of the Vietnam war.

Part Three. The United States and the Vietnam war.

January 16, 2026

➙ Ordre de passage pour les oraux blancs du 2^e trimestre en salles 138 / 138bis. Voir le programme sur l'ordre de passage.

1 | The origins of the war and the Domino Theory.

➣ What is that makes the Vietnam war a defining moment in American history ?

It was a “first” : the 1^st war ever lost by the USA.
And it was a national trauma, an ordeal that divided the nation very deeply.
The “domino theory”, invented in the 1950s, said that if one single Southeast Asian state fell to communism, all other states would follow.
After the French war in Indochina (1946-1954), two Vietnamese states were created : the communist North Vietnam (NVN) and the non-communist South Vietnam (SVN). As a consequence, NVN would try to reunify the country.
So, the US made a strategic mistake : they were willing to contain communism in Asia, just as they did successfully in Europe. In Vietnam, however, they were fighting a nationalism, not only communism.

➪ READ: The viewpoint of the American diplomat and strategist George F. Kennan on the flaws of the American involvement in Vietnam, from his book American diplomacy, published after the Vietnam war (1984).

➪ READ: a study of the Vietnam war for undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) in 2017.

➪ Subject № 1: The Vietnam Quagmire. Senator J. William Fulbright criticized the involvement in Vietnam as early as 1966 in an essay on “the arrogance of power”.

January 30, 2026

2 | Escalation.

➪ Subject № 2 : Why did the US lose the Vietnam war ?

➪ Subject № 3 : The Vietnam war, a national trauma.

➙ Do not forget this ! Oraux blancs du 2^e trimestre en salles 138 / 138bis. Voir le programme sur l'ordre de passage.

❑ In 1961-63, JFK had sent military advisors to SVN, to prevent the Vietcong (VC) from overwhelming the country.

❑ Kennedy did not want to escalate. He knew it was risky. But in November 1963, he was assassinated.

❑ Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), who succeeded him, did not have the same experience in military and foreign affairs. In 1964, he took advantage of an incident (“the Tonkin Gulf incident”), to pass a resolution (the “Tonkin Gulf resolution”), that gave him full authority to escalate the war.
⇒ In 1965, 500,000 American soldiers were in SVN. Meanwhile, the US Air Force was bombing NVN (“operation Rolling Thunder”, in which the B-52s of the Strategic Air Command were involved).

USAF B-52s bombing North Vietnam during the war.

❑ That huge US expeditionary corps required a draft. And the draft soon created dissent in the US. Most of the draftees were high school boys or students. So, there were demonstrations and draft-dodgers. Besides, the war was dirty. The bombings (sometimes with napalm) killed a lot of people. And the war was asymmetrical : the inexperienced, “green” draftees had to face guerilla tactics in a hostile environment. More, the war was shown on TV. For the very first time, the public was witnessing the horrors of the war. And for most of the viewers, it was unbearable.

February 6 and 13, 2026

➪ Subject № 4 : The memories of the Vietnam war. John McCain and Donald Trump.

3 | Dissent

Students burning draft card at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in December 1967. Campuses became hotbeds of dissent, because the students wanted to escape the draft and opposed the means used by the US government to wage that war. In Madison, the protest started in October 1967 as Dow Chemical, a company that produced plastic wraps and napalm, came to the campus to hire students.

➪ A BBC documentary, available on YouTube, How Vietnam was lost, based on David Maraniss's book They Marched into Sunlight (2004).It deals with two parallel events, both in 1967 : the battle of Ong Thanh, in which the Viet Cong wiped out an American battalion in the jungle of South Vietnam, and the Dow Chemical protest at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. See the abstract of the film.

➪ Subject № 5 : The Vietnam war in literature. An excerpt from Philip Roth's novel The Human stain. This subject does not conform with the regulations of your final test. It is provided as a document.
An analysis of that text can be found here.