Every war poses a puzzle but some are more puzzling than others. One reason why the Vietnam War is more puzzling than many others is that it marked the defeat of the world's largest superpower by a poor and small nation. Another reason is the fact that the making of consequential decisions inside the victorious party remains elusive to most students of the conflict. Why was a local conflict in Vietnam transformed into a major international war that involved history's heaviest bombing campaign and America's over half a million troops at one time? Why did the United States become mired in this disastrous war? Why did America lose to a physically far weaker enemy? Lien-Hang T. Nguyen's Hanoi's War sheds new light on these old questions by viewing the war from Vietnamese perspectives, those that are important but remain understudied in the English-language literature. She is able to do so thanks to her access to classified primary sources, internal documents, memoirs, and actors in the North and South Vietnamese sides of the war.

Nguyen's book emphasizes the paramount role of Le Duan, first secretary of the ruling Communist Party in North Vietnam, in driving war in South Vietnam and in the war's transformation into a major international conflict. Contrary to widespread belief, it was not the charismatic Ho Chi Minh or the militarily talented Vo Nguyen Giap but Duan, a revolutionary who lacked both charisma and military talent but was instead gifted with Machiavellian political skills (which Nguyen inaccurately calls “administrative skills”) and an iron will to pursue formidable goals, who was the architect, main strategist, and commander-in-chief of communist Vietnam's war efforts. Duan firmly believed that the reunification of Vietnam would only be possible with the complete overthrow of the Saigon regime, that war was the only road that would lead to reunification, and that, in his own words, “the war that the enemy has initiated will be an opportunity for us to unify the country” (33, 45). In addition to his preference for war, Duan had a strong tendency to favor risky military strategies and disfavor approaches that required more patience. It did not bother him either that his aggressive go-for-broke military strategy facilitated the rise of more intractable and hawkish enemies in Washington and Saigon, a pattern that kept coming back throughout the war. A recent Vietnamese account reveals that it was Duan who gave the order to attack the US destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2, 1964, inadvertently setting off a chain of events that brought the US congressional approval for war and large-scale US military intervention in Vietnam (Huy Duc, Ben Thang Cuoc [The winning side], vol. 2, Quyen Binh [Power] [OsinBook, 2012], 149–50).

Perhaps the greatest merit of Hanoi's War is not its focus on Le Duan but its analysis of how leaders in Hanoi, Saigon, and Washington pursued their objectives. What is most fascinating in this analysis is that these leaders recurrently faced challenges to their strategy and authority from both domestic opponents and foreign allies and the policies they advanced often reflected their responses to these challenges. This held true not just for the pluralistic United States and its stubborn South Vietnamese ally, but even more so for the outwardly monolithic North Vietnam with its stated brotherly solidarity with China and the Soviet Union.

This analysis contains many of the issues where Nguyen's book challenges the conventional wisdom about what happened. For example, his commitment to total war put Le Duan in a difficult position that required constant maneuvering to deflect and defy the Soviet urge for peace negotiation and the Chinese push for small-scale guerrilla strategy. Inside his own country, Duan and his right-hand man Le Duc Tho identified President Ho Chi Minh and Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap as their nemeses. The sin of Ho and Giap was that they not only commanded more respect than the former from the population but also advocated different strategies from those embraced by them. Once Duan and Tho were trusted with the chief organizational tasks in the Communist Party bureaucracy, from the late 1950s and throughout the subsequent decades, they built a police state to eliminate the opponents and control the subordinates and marginalized Ho and Giap in major strategy decisions. With Duan's blessing, Tho staged a series of purges between 1963 and 1968 against high-ranking and middle-level officials suspected to be close to Ho and Giap. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was prepared and approved when Giap was on a self-imposed exile in Hungary, and started after Giap's staff at Hanoi's military headquarters was already locked in jail. In a story not included in Nguyen's book but reported by Ho's personal secretary, Vu Ky, Ho's flight from China to attend the Communist Party session that was to make the final decision on the Tet Offensive encountered at the Hanoi airport an unusual technical problem that hinted at an attempt, if not to assassinate him, then at least to prevent him from attending the meeting (Huy Duc, 155).

With Nguyen's groundbreaking book, the Vietnam War as depicted in the English-language literature is no longer one in which the most consequential decisions to start and prolong it are primarily made by Americans. The new materials have enabled Nguyen to argue that “Washington was not alone in prolonging the war; often American leaders were at the mercy of actors in Hanoi and Saigon who had their own geostrategic reasons to extend the fighting and to frustrate the peace negotiations” (9). Efforts to accelerate the peace negotiations during 1968–1972 by the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were blunted and undermined by their allies in Saigon and Hanoi. Leaders in the two Vietnamese states used obstruction, blackmail, and threats to influence their patrons’ actions. Equally amazing is the finding that these methods were rendered ineffective in the hands of the patrons. As a result, President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger had to rely more heavily on the two remaining weapons in their arsenal: superpower diplomacy and military escalation.

The war efforts of both the United States and its North Vietnamese enemy involved not just military actions but also political, diplomatic, and public-relations operations. Paradoxically, it was not the military part that was the key to their respective achievement. The key to Washington's attainment of “peace with honor” was Nixon and Kissinger's skillful superpower diplomacy based on the strategy of balance of power. “The key to Hanoi's ultimate success in the war,” Nguyen notes, “lay not in launching general offensives or even winning hearts and minds in South Vietnam; rather, it resided with its world relations campaign aimed at procuring the support of antiwar movements around the world” (311).

It is unfortunate that Hanoi's War dispenses with the final stage of the Vietnam War (from 1973 until 1975) and examines the views of President Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap insufficiently. These topics are essential for the analysis of Hanoi's grand strategy. In the period following the Paris Peace Accord of 1973, it was Giap who initiated, planned, and actually commanded the military campaigns that were aimed at and eventually brought about Hanoi's final victory. During this period, Giap advocated a “South-first” strategy, prioritizing the liberation of the South over the development of the North, whereas Duan initially adopted a “North-first” approach (Huy Duc, 164–73). Nguyen's characterization of the North Vietnamese factions, with Duan and Tho variously as “South-firsters,” “pro-war leaders,” and “militants,” and Ho and Giap representing the “North-firsters,” the “peace faction,” and the “moderates,” needs more nuance.

A more thorough examination of the views and strategies of Ho and Giap may well indicate that they were more “moderates” than “North-firsters” and that the central cleavage among the ruling elites in Hanoi in terms of grand strategy may lie not between liberation of the South and development of the North but elsewhere. Such an analysis may also suggest that even if moderates like Ho and Giap had controlled the helm of North Vietnam, the combination of American leaders’ belief in the domino theory, their confidence in US material superiority, communist Vietnamese leaders’ belief in the belligerent nature of imperialists, and their confidence in Vietnamese moral and psychological superiority might be sufficient to turn the local conflict in Vietnam into a major international war, which might then be even more unwinnable for the United States. Still, Nguyen's book correctly suggests that the war that Le Duan drove would have been far different, more tragic, and more gruesome than the counterfactual one led by Ho Chi Minh or Vo Nguyen Giap.