Shortly after the momentous Vietnamese victory over French forces at Dienbienphu in the spring of 1954, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of Ho Chi Minh's Vietnamese troops, made a prophetic statement:

Twenty years later, as the US government prepared for its final withdrawal from Saigon after almost a decade of bloody, destructive fighting, the enduring power of Giap's prophecy was clearly evident: neither the French nor the Americans, despite mass mobilization of arms and resources, had proven to have the will to fight a long-drawn-out battle against the Vietnamese. Though not the sole reason, this was, at least in part, due to the fact that officials in Paris and Washington perceived events there in fundamentally different ways to the Vietnamese. While the US and France had their pride and, allegedly, the security of the West at stake, the Vietnamese were fighting for control of their entire history. Both the French and American conflicts in Vietnam, in fact, had proven to be transitory moments in a much wider panorama of Vietnamese history, just two more episodes in an enduring quest for national sovereignty that stretched significantly beyond the 1945–75 timescale most commonly viewed as marking the Wars of Vietnam. “The contest of ideas,” Mark Bradley notes in opening his brief but admirably dense book on Vietnam's experiences during these events, “began long before 1945 and persists to the present day in yet another war, this one of memory over the legacies of the Vietnam wars and the stakes of remembering and forgetting them” (2).

The entire premise of Vietnam at War is to reorient our perceptions of the Vietnam War era – moving us away from our perennial focus on the role of the West in the fighting there after 1945 and returning the people that it had most effect upon, the Vietnamese, to the centre of the tale. Doing so resituates the conflict: it prioritizes intellectual history and ideas of national sovereignty over geopolitical calculations in Washington, Moscow, Beijing and Paris; it breaks down the notion of the Cold War providing the singular causal framework for understanding what happened in Vietnam; and, most importantly, it provides a more human understanding of the effect that the wars for Vietnam had on the people of that nation. The book, Bradley argues early on, “marks a sharp departure from prevailing narratives in the West, which have until recently rendered the Vietnamese almost invisible in the making of their own history” (3). Understanding the course of events in Vietnam, the author suggests, simply cannot happen unless you understand the role – and ideas – of the Vietnamese.

Perhaps the greatest success of Bradley's book is the sophisticated synthesis it provides of the ideas, identities and engagements of the Vietnamese people with the wars for Vietnam and then, afterwards, with the struggle to define Vietnam in the context of its history. Building on two decades of scholarship and teaching on Vietnam, and aided and abetted by an extant literature as voluminous and prolific as that of almost any other field, Bradley is able to construct a clear picture of how the Vietnamese people constructed their position with respect to their own sense of self. An important part of this, moreover, is an undertaking to view Vietnamese nationhood outside the dominant framework of a perpetual bid for self-determination against Chinese, French and American occupiers. On the contrary, Bradley explains, Vietnamese identity was much more complex and inchoate than that one-dimensional model suggests.

An obvious example of what the author is referring to comes in the first chapter, which explores the various intellectual constructs that underpinned Vietnamese identity throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on Buddhism, Confucianism, Catholicism, the Enlightenment and Marxism, and featuring a cast of thinkers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, Herbert Spencer, Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei and Lenin, the intellectual identity of Vietnamese groups across the nineteenth century and the early twentieth was enormously fluid and diverse. Just as importantly, it was also fractious and disputatious. There was not one sense of being Vietnamese and what that meant; different groups believed different things and held different principles to be true. The Marxist collectivism of Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, Bradley explains, predictably grated against other sections of Vietnamese society more wedded to the individualist creeds of Confucianism and heavy Francophile influence. Hence not even a burgeoning sense of Vietnamese nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, of which Ho Chi Minh's group were the most vocal advocates, could distil these competing ideas. The kind of Vietnam that might emerge in the postcolonial era, the author writes, was uncertain “because so many Vietnamese actors saw the elusive post-colonial future through a very different lens from the Vietnamese communists” (39).

Other chapters continue this theme of disparities within Vietnamese identity, and in doing so Bradley makes excellent use of the rich vein of studies that have emerged on Vietnam in the last thirty or so years. Even the fighting of the war against the US between 1965 and 1973 was characterized by regional and philosophical factionalism. The local experience of fighting the Vietnam War, the book suggests, continued this pattern of competing ideas. Narratives of us versus them, communist versus noncommunist, north versus south, simply do not do justice the variety of intellectual and nationalistic ferment in evidence in Vietnam after 1945.

But the rich and sophisticated explorations of the intellectual undercurrents in evidence among Vietnamese groups point to a shortfall, both in this book and in Cold War studies in general. While some scholars may well have different conclusions on the features of Vietnamese identity that Bradley discusses, the most salient feature to my mind was the fluidity and diverseness of these intellectual currents. The same is not true, however, with respect to the United States. And, as with any book on Vietnam, the US looms large over proceedings. Those sections dealing with the role of the US, then, feel stilted in comparison with those on the Vietnamese or even the French. For the most part, Bradley's analysis hews to the line set out by the major works on US policy in Vietnam and references familiar touchstones in the American path to war. Recent studies that have posited cultural factors as lying behind US decision-making are utilized, but the overarching framework that dominates the road to an Americanized war is the omnipresent threat of the Cold War. Clearly, the book is not intended to focus too heavily on the American side. Nor does the author claim at any point to be doing so. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the conclusion that, when it comes to the US, there is a distinct lack of innovation with regard to the intellectual currents driving Washington's Vietnam policy that is in stark contrast to the multilayered examinations in evidence with regard to the Vietnamese.

It is a line of enquiry, moreover, that is equally true of wider studies regarding US policy in the Cold War. For all the studies citing tropes of gender, race, religion and sexuality in US policy, and all the studies citing the agency of other nations in their dealings with the US, there remains a sense, in broad terms, that we know what the dominant features of US policy were. Post-1945 foreign policy, broadly speaking, can be defined by the precepts of the Cold War and entrenched notions of anticommunism. As the literature on the Cold War era becomes more innovative and diverse, however, and as some scholars begin to challenge the centrality of the Cold War in post-1945 international history, it is becoming increasingly necessary for historians of US policy to pursue less monolithic constructions of American policy – to acknowledge the undoubted importance of the Cold War, certainly, but also to move beyond it and consider other factors in US thinking. As examinations of the Cold War era grow more sophisticated, and as scholars become less beholden to reflexively prioritizing the importance of factors of national security in US policy, a raft of innovative and important studies will assuredly emerge. It is not a case of decentring the Cold War; rather, it is about adopting a more variable approach to understanding the motivating factors behind US policy.

The inspiration for this, finally, can come from works such as Bradley's. Arguably, this is the major feature to come out of this fascinating work of synthesis on the role of the Vietnamese in the wars that took place in their nation after 1945. Bradley's study of Vietnamese identity highlights possible ways that similar approaches could be taken with respect to the US and, also, the potential benefits of undertaking such a task. A more nuanced understanding of American thinking with respect to Vietnam outside the dominant paradigm of the Cold War – a task, incidentally, that Bradley demonstrated the importance of in his first book that examined US visions of Vietnam between 1919 and 1950 – can offer much to historians' attempts to build a more complete picture of the course of the wars for Vietnam and, more broadly, of America's experiences during the Cold War era.