Pierre Asselin
Biographic Data
| ID | 2020998 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pierre Asselin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pierre |
| FAMILY NAME | Asselin |
| SIGNATURE | ASSELIN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | San Diego State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2526-8260 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Viêt Nam 1945
Round table for the 50 th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, part I
International audience
The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war's end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet-American détente, and global counter-culturalism served in various wa…
Vietnam's American War
The American war in Vietnam was so much more than the sum of its battles. To make sense of it, we must look beyond the conflict itself. We must understand its context and, above all, the formative experiences, worldview, and motivations of those who devised communist strategies and tactics. Vietnam's American War, now in its second edition, remains a story of how and why Hanoi won. However, this revised and expanded edition offers more extensive …
National liberation by other means
This article considers Americans who travelled to North Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War (1965–75). It demonstrates, on the basis of revelations in files from the Vietnamese national archives, that authorities in Hanoi exercised far more control over visits by US citizens and the impressions they created than the visitors themselves and those who have written about them had heretofore surmised. In visiting North Vietnam on Hanoi’s very sp…
The Indochinese Communist Party's Unfinished Revolution of 1945 and the Origins of Vietnam's 30-Year Civil War
This article examines the genesis and outcomes of the so-called August Revolution undertaken by the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1945. Drawing on Vietnamese archival materials and ICP resolutions, instructions, and assessments, the article shows that the revolution did not culminate in ICP dominance of Vietnamese politics and that Chinese Nationalist occupation authorities in northern Vietnam were neither cordial nor obliging toward the g…
French Decolonisation and Civil War
This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. It focuses on civil conflict in two French colonial territories, Vietnam and Algeria, during and immediately after 1945. It investigates the civil war dynamics of local, often intra-ethnic contests among anticolonial oppositionists. Concentrating on the early, formative years of insurgent violence, we aim to demon…
Forgotten Front
Forgotten Front: The NLF in Hanoi's Diplomatic Struggle, 1965–67 Get access Pierre Asselin Pierre Asselin Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 45, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 330–355, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhaa091 Published: 18 January 2021
Vietnam’s Lost Revolution
E dwin E. M oïse . The Myths of Tet
Most books about the Vietnam War rehash the same old arguments and interpretations, remaining predicated on the same basic premises as those that came before. Accordingly, the conflict’s historiography suggests that the war was a predominantly American affair, that U.S. policy failures and the domestic response to them determined its outcome, and that the Vietnamese were either hapless victims or stooges of foreign powers. Equally central in this…
Global revolutionary currents, the Vietnamese revolution, and the origins of the American War
This paper considers the impact of key events in the Third World (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) on Vietnamese communist strategic thinking during the early 1960s. Committed as they were to the reunification of their state, Hanoi leaders were devoted internationalists at heart who conditioned their domestic and foreign policies on the basis of global ‘currents’ and the worldwide ‘balance of forces.’ Socialist internationalism, ‘world revolution…
Vietnam's American War
Communist forces in the Vietnam War lost most battles and suffered disproportionally higher casualties than the United States and its allies throughout the conflict. The ground war in South Vietnam and the air war in the North were certainly important in shaping the fates of the victors and losers, but they alone fail to explain why Hanoi bested Washington in the end. To make sense of the Vietnam War, we must look beyond the war itself. In his ne…
De Gaulle et le Vietnam, 1945–1969
Pierre Journoud has produced a splendid account of the Vietnam policies of President Charles de Gaulle and of France more generally in the period 1945–1969. Although much has been made of the role that ideological considerations—la grandeur de la France and anti-Americanism—played in conditioning French foreign policy in the postwar era, Journoud maintains that under Le général at least, pragmatic, realist concerns dominated.In the immediate afte…
A Missed Opportunity for Peace in Vietnam
According to “conventional wisdom” (p. xv), the 1966 peace initiative code-named “Marigold” by the Johnson administration could never succeed because both the United States and North Vietnam were by then already too invested in pursuing military victory. It was, in this sense, a “nonevent” (p. xv). Not at all the case, James Hershberg counters. Marigold was not only a missed opportunity for peace as Hanoi was at that time genuinely interested in …
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War opens in 1954 with the signing of the Geneva accords that ended the eight-year-long Franco-Indochinese War and created two Vietnams. In agreeing to the accords, Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam anticipated a new period of peace leading to national reunification under their rule; they never imagined that within a decade they would be engaged in an even bigger feud with the United S…
We Don't Want a Munich”
This paper explores Hanoi's diplomatic strategy during the early stage of the so-called Vietnam War. It draws from Vietnamese, Western, and other materials to elucidate the meanings and usages Hanoi attached to diplomacy in those years, to describe the related maneuverings of North Vietnamese leaders, and to identify the forces shaping those maneuvers. Following the onset of war Hanoi rejected negotiations with Washington, but that did not mean t…
Explaining America's lost war
Gary R. Hess, Malden, MA and Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, xxii+218 pp. This is an excellent book for those seeking help in navigating the vast amount of literature on the Vietnam War. Its su
Revisionism Triumphant
After the Tet Offensive of early 1968, Hanoi agreed to hold talks with U.S. representatives in Paris. The North Vietnamese, however, used the resulting talks with the Johnson administration not to negotiate in any traditional sense but to probe the intentions of Washington and to manipulate domestic and world opinion. Hanoi continued this charade for approximately a year, until domestic and international circumstances forced a meaningful reassess…
Using the Văn Kiện Đảng Series to Understand Vietnamese Revolutionary Strategy During the Vietnam War, 1954–1975
Research Article| June 01 2010 Using the Văn Kiện Đảng Series to Understand Vietnamese Revolutionary Strategy During the Vietnam War, 1954––1975 Pierre Asselin Pierre Asselin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2010) 5 (2): 219–224. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.219 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Sha…
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the 1954 Geneva Conference
Drawing upon documentary and other evidence from Vietnam this paper argues that in 1954 the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) accepted negotiations and a diplomatic solution to its war against France because it served some of its most vital interests and satisfied its sense of the possibilities of the moment. To be sure, the DRVN leadership responded positively to concerns and pressures from its socialist allies, the Soviet Union and China, o…
Making sense of the Vietnam wars
Making sense of the Vietnam wars: local, national, and transnational perspectives." , 10(1), pp. 133–134
Choosing Peace
Based largely on new documentary evidence from Vietnam, this article examines North Vietnamese policymaking immediately after the signing of the 1954 Geneva accords. The article demonstrates that leaders in Hanoi sought to abide by the accord on Vietnam because they genuinely believed that implementation would produce national reunification peacefully and in accordance with the interests of the “socialist revolution.” To that end, they instructed…
Kimball's Vietnam War
Journal Article Kimball's Vietnam War Get access Kimball Jeffrey. The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xvii + 352 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, illustrations, and maps. $34.94 (cloth). Pierre Asselin Pierre Asselin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 30, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 163–167, https://…
A Reunion of Soldiers (A Vietnam War Refection
This short and somewhat amateurish documentary provides interesting insights into the South Vietnamese experience during the so-called Vietnam War. Set against the backdrop of a reunion of former officers in the Army of the Republic of [South] Vietnam (arvn) that took place in New Orleans in 2005, the film relies on interviews with a number of those officers to explore such issues as Saigon's decision to capitulate on April 30, 1975, the causes f…
Hanoi and Americanization of the War in Vietnam
The spring 1965 deployment of U.S. ground forces to South Vietnam and initiation of sustained aerial and naval bombardments of the North by the U.S. military marked a turning point in the history of the Vietnamese Revolution. Until recently, Western scholars only vaguely understood Hanoi's attitude toward those developments and what they meant for the revolution it spearheaded. Newly available materials from Vietnam provide a clearer picture of t…
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the 1954 Geneva Conference
Drawing upon documentary and other evidence from Vietnam this paper argues that in 1954 the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) accepted negotiations and a diplomatic solution to its war against France because it served some of its most vital interests and satisfied its sense of the possibilities of the moment. To be sure, the DRVN leadership responded positively to concerns and pressures from its socialist allies, the Soviet Union and China, o…
Le Duan, the American War, and the Creation of an Independent Vietnamese State
Since the end of the Vietnam War thirty years ago, Western scholars have made countless attempts at explaining that conflict's course and rationalizing its outcome. These attempts have considered a wide variety of elements ranging from the personalities of those involved in the decision- making process in Washington to the technologies used by American forces against their enemies in Indochina. Ironically, few scholars have considered the element…
Revisionism Triumphant
After the Tet Offensive of early 1968, Hanoi agreed to hold talks with U.S. representatives in Paris. The North Vietnamese, however, used the resulting talks with the Johnson administration not to negotiate in any traditional sense but to probe the intentions of Washington and to manipulate domestic and world opinion. Hanoi continued this charade for approximately a year, until domestic and international circumstances forced a meaningful reassess…
Making sense of the Vietnam wars
Making sense of the Vietnam wars: local, national, and transnational perspectives." , 10(1), pp. 133–134
Le Duan, the American War, and the Creation of an Independent Vietnamese State
Since the end of the Vietnam War thirty years ago, Western scholars have made countless attempts at explaining that conflict's course and rationalizing its outcome. These attempts have considered a wide variety of elements ranging from the personalities of those involved in the decision- making process in Washington to the technologies used by American forces against their enemies in Indochina. Ironically, few scholars have considered the element…
Hanoi and Americanization of the War in Vietnam
The spring 1965 deployment of U.S. ground forces to South Vietnam and initiation of sustained aerial and naval bombardments of the North by the U.S. military marked a turning point in the history of the Vietnamese Revolution. Until recently, Western scholars only vaguely understood Hanoi's attitude toward those developments and what they meant for the revolution it spearheaded. Newly available materials from Vietnam provide a clearer picture of t…
Kimball's Vietnam War
Journal Article Kimball's Vietnam War Get access Kimball Jeffrey. The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xvii + 352 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, illustrations, and maps. $34.94 (cloth). Pierre Asselin Pierre Asselin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 30, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 163–167, https://…
A Reunion of Soldiers (A Vietnam War Refection
This short and somewhat amateurish documentary provides interesting insights into the South Vietnamese experience during the so-called Vietnam War. Set against the backdrop of a reunion of former officers in the Army of the Republic of [South] Vietnam (arvn) that took place in New Orleans in 2005, the film relies on interviews with a number of those officers to explore such issues as Saigon's decision to capitulate on April 30, 1975, the causes f…
Choosing Peace
Based largely on new documentary evidence from Vietnam, this article examines North Vietnamese policymaking immediately after the signing of the 1954 Geneva accords. The article demonstrates that leaders in Hanoi sought to abide by the accord on Vietnam because they genuinely believed that implementation would produce national reunification peacefully and in accordance with the interests of the “socialist revolution.” To that end, they instructed…
Using the Văn Kiện Đảng Series to Understand Vietnamese Revolutionary Strategy During the Vietnam War, 1954–1975
Research Article| June 01 2010 Using the Văn Kiện Đảng Series to Understand Vietnamese Revolutionary Strategy During the Vietnam War, 1954––1975 Pierre Asselin Pierre Asselin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2010) 5 (2): 219–224. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.219 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Sha…
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the 1954 Geneva Conference
Drawing upon documentary and other evidence from Vietnam this paper argues that in 1954 the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) accepted negotiations and a diplomatic solution to its war against France because it served some of its most vital interests and satisfied its sense of the possibilities of the moment. To be sure, the DRVN leadership responded positively to concerns and pressures from its socialist allies, the Soviet Union and China, o…
Making sense of the Vietnam wars
Making sense of the Vietnam wars: local, national, and transnational perspectives." , 10(1), pp. 133–134
Revisionism Triumphant
After the Tet Offensive of early 1968, Hanoi agreed to hold talks with U.S. representatives in Paris. The North Vietnamese, however, used the resulting talks with the Johnson administration not to negotiate in any traditional sense but to probe the intentions of Washington and to manipulate domestic and world opinion. Hanoi continued this charade for approximately a year, until domestic and international circumstances forced a meaningful reassess…
We Don't Want a Munich”
This paper explores Hanoi's diplomatic strategy during the early stage of the so-called Vietnam War. It draws from Vietnamese, Western, and other materials to elucidate the meanings and usages Hanoi attached to diplomacy in those years, to describe the related maneuverings of North Vietnamese leaders, and to identify the forces shaping those maneuvers. Following the onset of war Hanoi rejected negotiations with Washington, but that did not mean t…
Explaining America's lost war
Gary R. Hess, Malden, MA and Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2009, xxii+218 pp. This is an excellent book for those seeking help in navigating the vast amount of literature on the Vietnam War. Its su
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965
Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War opens in 1954 with the signing of the Geneva accords that ended the eight-year-long Franco-Indochinese War and created two Vietnams. In agreeing to the accords, Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam anticipated a new period of peace leading to national reunification under their rule; they never imagined that within a decade they would be engaged in an even bigger feud with the United S…
A Missed Opportunity for Peace in Vietnam
According to “conventional wisdom” (p. xv), the 1966 peace initiative code-named “Marigold” by the Johnson administration could never succeed because both the United States and North Vietnam were by then already too invested in pursuing military victory. It was, in this sense, a “nonevent” (p. xv). Not at all the case, James Hershberg counters. Marigold was not only a missed opportunity for peace as Hanoi was at that time genuinely interested in …
De Gaulle et le Vietnam, 1945–1969
Pierre Journoud has produced a splendid account of the Vietnam policies of President Charles de Gaulle and of France more generally in the period 1945–1969. Although much has been made of the role that ideological considerations—la grandeur de la France and anti-Americanism—played in conditioning French foreign policy in the postwar era, Journoud maintains that under Le général at least, pragmatic, realist concerns dominated.In the immediate afte…
Vietnam's American War
Communist forces in the Vietnam War lost most battles and suffered disproportionally higher casualties than the United States and its allies throughout the conflict. The ground war in South Vietnam and the air war in the North were certainly important in shaping the fates of the victors and losers, but they alone fail to explain why Hanoi bested Washington in the end. To make sense of the Vietnam War, we must look beyond the war itself. In his ne…
Global revolutionary currents, the Vietnamese revolution, and the origins of the American War
This paper considers the impact of key events in the Third World (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) on Vietnamese communist strategic thinking during the early 1960s. Committed as they were to the reunification of their state, Hanoi leaders were devoted internationalists at heart who conditioned their domestic and foreign policies on the basis of global ‘currents’ and the worldwide ‘balance of forces.’ Socialist internationalism, ‘world revolution…
Vietnam’s Lost Revolution
E dwin E. M oïse . The Myths of Tet
Most books about the Vietnam War rehash the same old arguments and interpretations, remaining predicated on the same basic premises as those that came before. Accordingly, the conflict’s historiography suggests that the war was a predominantly American affair, that U.S. policy failures and the domestic response to them determined its outcome, and that the Vietnamese were either hapless victims or stooges of foreign powers. Equally central in this…
Forgotten Front
Forgotten Front: The NLF in Hanoi's Diplomatic Struggle, 1965–67 Get access Pierre Asselin Pierre Asselin Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 45, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 330–355, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhaa091 Published: 18 January 2021
French Decolonisation and Civil War
This article draws together historical sources and political science insights to test the emergence of civil war at the end of empire. It focuses on civil conflict in two French colonial territories, Vietnam and Algeria, during and immediately after 1945. It investigates the civil war dynamics of local, often intra-ethnic contests among anticolonial oppositionists. Concentrating on the early, formative years of insurgent violence, we aim to demon…
The Indochinese Communist Party's Unfinished Revolution of 1945 and the Origins of Vietnam's 30-Year Civil War
This article examines the genesis and outcomes of the so-called August Revolution undertaken by the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1945. Drawing on Vietnamese archival materials and ICP resolutions, instructions, and assessments, the article shows that the revolution did not culminate in ICP dominance of Vietnamese politics and that Chinese Nationalist occupation authorities in northern Vietnam were neither cordial nor obliging toward the g…
The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war's end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet-American détente, and global counter-culturalism served in various wa…
Vietnam's American War
The American war in Vietnam was so much more than the sum of its battles. To make sense of it, we must look beyond the conflict itself. We must understand its context and, above all, the formative experiences, worldview, and motivations of those who devised communist strategies and tactics. Vietnam's American War, now in its second edition, remains a story of how and why Hanoi won. However, this revised and expanded edition offers more extensive …
National liberation by other means
This article considers Americans who travelled to North Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War (1965–75). It demonstrates, on the basis of revelations in files from the Vietnamese national archives, that authorities in Hanoi exercised far more control over visits by US citizens and the impressions they created than the visitors themselves and those who have written about them had heretofore surmised. In visiting North Vietnam on Hanoi’s very sp…
Viêt Nam 1945
Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (21 works) · Vietnam War (21 works) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (17 works) · History (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Vietnamese (12 works)