Transnational Activism and Diplomacy During the US War in Vietnam

How can collective pressure lead to a change in decision-making in wartime? During the US War in Vietnam, collective pressure mounted around the globe for the US to change course, from individual citizens protesting the war to other nations condemning the US for committing war crimes in Vietnam. During the Nixon administration, this collective global pressure contributed to strategic changes in thinking around how the war should be fought (Vietnamization) and how it should be presented. My paper will investigate how means of collective pressure, specifically the global anti-war and resistance movements, influenced these strategic changes and ultimately may have contributed to the war’s cessation. This paper will discuss how anti-war movements outside the United States, particularly in Europe, altered the diplomatic relationship between the US and its European allies through actions including: Sweden and France holding US draft deserters as a way to protest the war, broad anti-war resistance campaigns in the United Kingdom (who argued that their nation was complicit in the war), and Americans living in exile in Europe as a means of resisting the US war in Vietnam. Through investigating these non-traditional means of collective pressure in a region that has been less studied in the extant historiography, this presentation will sit in conversation with the other papers in this panel to demonstrate how these citizens outside the US brought about political shifts within their host countries which subsequently influenced those countries’ diplomatic relationships with the US over the issue of Vietnam.