The United States in the World. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2013. xi, 276 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8014-5061-7.
Recent years have yielded a rich harvest of book-length studies on the period from the end of the First Indochina War (1946–1954) and the Geneva Accords to US imperial intervention, the establishment of the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN, 1955–1975), and the Ngo Dinh Diem regime (1954–1963) in the country’s southern half. Authors like James Carter, Philip Catton, Seth Jacobs, Mark Lawrence, Fredrik Logevall and Edward Miller have expanded our knowledge of, in particular, the politics and diplomacy of the era. Much of that recent work provides a more complex portrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem and the US-supported state he established in the crucial months and years after the Geneva Conference. While the contours of a nuanced treatment of the RVN and the Diem government had already appeared in Viet Nam Studies, such a detailed analysis of Ngo Dinh Diem had been lacking in Viet Nam War Studies, still dominated by US-centrism and largely un-emancipated from Cold War prerogatives. Neither “US puppet” nor “Churchill of the East,” Ngo Dinh Diem emerges in this new literature as a nationalist in his own right, masterful in manipulating political forces around him, and, while beholden to the US, ruthlessly pursues his own agenda.
Jessica Chapman adds to this œuvre with her important, immensely insightful and readable Cauldron of Resistance. Like many of her recent peers, she focuses particularly on the years 1953–1956: the end of the French war, the Geneva Conference, and political events and diplomatic moves in Viet Nam’s south surrounding the dual replacement of the Associated State of Viet Nam (ASVN, 1949–1955) under Bao Dai with the RVN under Diem and of the French presence with US overlordship. In her treatment of the symbiotic, yet contentious Diem-US relationship itself, Chapman largely focuses on the familiar cast of characters and political and diplomatic archives like other recent publications. She similarly notes the irony of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime: Diem’s personal traits and uncompromising, violent strategies that soon assured the RVN’s stabilization in the country’s southern half also led to his downfall in 1963; his singular feat of imposing central state power over the southern regions came at the heavy price of simultaneously sowing the seeds of the eventual destruction both of his regime and the US neo-colonial project south of the DMZ.
The core contributions of Cauldron of Resistance, however, lie in the twist that Chapman adds to our knowledge of the ASVN and the early RVN. She provides the first sustained study of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen as influential political actors since the 1940s and argues convincingly that these “politico-religious organizations” be considered centrally in any serious analysis of the period. Here Chapman positions herself against prevailing notions in the literature that too quickly dismiss these “sects” and “crime cartels” as regional power brokers without national ambitions and as “warlords” defending their fiefs, whose bloody destruction in 1954/55 only serves to highlight Diem’s success at “nation-building” and as a mere way-station towards the RVN’s ultimate confrontation with communism.
Rather, Chapman argues, these three politico-religious organizations were deeply embedded in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious environment of Viet Nam’s deep south and arose in a milieu of millenarian movements, secret societies, syncretic religious and cultural associations, and multipolar power under a repressive, unsettling colonial regime. They defended their autonomy and pursued their anti-colonial, yet anti-communist national ambitions in uneasy alliances with, variously, the French, Trotskyites, the Japanese, the Viet Minh, and Bao Dai loyalists, or in violent conflict against some of these forces at other times. (Chapman’s chapter 1 provides a superb overview of this multifaceted history from the 1840s to the 1940s.) By the early 1950s, the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen enjoyed formidable political and military power in the south and prominence in the vigorous public debates and behind-the-scenes maneuvers surrounding the Geneva Accords. In the complex contexts of their times, they were rational political actors.
Cauldron argues that US officials, however, were deaf to the appeals of these politico-religious groups as they misread them—encouraged by Ngo Dinh Diem—as exotic, irrational, anti-modern, “feudal” warlords, bandits and sects. Chapman’s point here wonderfully complements Seth Jacobs’ argument that the US threw their support behind Diem in part because his Catholicism, conservatism, and anti-communism resonated deeply with, and hence was legible to, 1950s US political culture.
Chapman’s second major argument is that it was Diem’s intolerance of the challenge to his power posed by the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen, more so than any communist threat, that motivated the rapid construction of the RVN’s repressive state apparatus in 1954–1956, when there was no active revolutionary resistance south of the DMZ. Even after destroying the three organizations’ militias by 1955, Diem continued to employ, with active US support, his police state’s “terroristic” campaigns against all opposition, even if outwardly anti-communist, mainly out of concern over lingering politico-religious networks and influences. This is a novel argument challenging conventional Cold War interpretations, but Chapman’s diligent documentation is indeed persuasive.
The book’s important third insight arises from its preceding argument: Diem’s state terror campaigns were so uncompromising, indiscriminate and violent that they eventually drove politico-religious partisans into an alliance of necessity with southern communists and created the late 1950s revolutionary conditions leading to the founding of the National Liberation Front (NLF). Misread by US officials, excluded from power and hunted by Diem, Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen leaders and followers became constitutive members of the southern revolutionary resistance that ultimately helped defeat the RVN and the US. Here Chapman gives us an indication that a thorough re-evaluation of the NLF outside of Cold War clichés is an urgent task awaiting the field.
I have a few quibbles with Cauldron of Resistance. With its emphasis on the three politico-religious groups, the book’s title hardly reflects its actual focus and genuine contribution. Given that the power bases of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen were in former Cochinchina, Chapman should have given the reader a better understanding of their political activities and ambitions in other regions, particularly the centre. I also find the author’s use of the term “communist” sweeping, even as she forcefully argues, in the case of “sects,” for a more nuanced terminology. The book’s glossary of Vietnamese diacritics contains quite a few errors. Finally, Chapman’s conclusion with its US foreign policy recommendations and linkage to the so-called “war on terror” seems contrived and naïve; some of its language (e.g., “In Vietnam, the battle between the forces of communism and those in support of American-style liberal democratic capitalism…”) stands in contradiction to the book’s very points.
Nevertheless, Jessica Chapman’s Cauldron of Resistance is a fine achievement and a welcome addition to the study of 1950s Viet Nam and US interventionism, contains a number of important arguments that demand reconsideration of our assumptions, and therefore is highly recommended.
Christoph Giebel
University of Washington, Seattle, USA