Hanoi’s Thirty-Year War

With the recent availability of archival materials and previously closed-circulation texts from Vietnam on the “Thirty Year War,” scholars have begun to put forward new studies on the wars for Indochina.  What they have published both confirms and refutes existing interpretations of the French Indochina War in western studies and the Vietnam War in American history.  This paper attempts to analyze the state of new documentation from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on its “struggle for decolonization, liberation, and reunification.”  It discusses the top level Vietnamese communist leadership during the First and Second Indochina wars, the complex state of relations between leaders in Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow, and the relationship between diplomacy and war during both conflicts.