The Vietnam War lasted twenty years and resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers, with many more Vietnamese victims. But the roots of the American-led conflict lay in the complex colonial history of Vietnam itself. Here, Pablo de Orellana uses recently declassified material to provide a new interpretation of the diplomatic failures and processes that lead to the outbreak and continuation of the conflict. Through a focus on the first Vietnam War, de Orellana shows how and why a Southeast Asian French colony already devastated by two wars came to be seen as an existential threat by policymakers in the United States, and how an attempt to stem the influence of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China spiraled out of control. The Road to Vietnam features new archival documents, including diplomatic notes and briefing material, to construct a new history of America's descent into conflict. This will be an essential resource for scholars and students of the Vietnam War and 20th Century diplomatic history.

Why did the USA become involved in Vietnam? What led US policy makers to become convinced that Vietnam posed a threat to American interests? In The Road to Vietnam, Pablo de Orellana traces the origins of the US-Vietnam War back to 1945-1948 and the diplomatic relations fostered in this period between the US, France and Vietnam, during the First Vietnam War that pitted imperial France against the anti-colonial Vietminh rebel alliance. With specific focus on the representation of the parties involved through the processes of diplomatic production, the book examines how the groundwork was laid for the US-Vietnam War of the 60's and 70's. Examining the France-Vietminh conflict through poststructuralist and postcolonial lenses, de Orellana reveals the processes by which the US and France built up the perception of Vietnam as a communist threat. Drawing on archival diplomatic texts, the representation of political identity between diplomatic actors is examined as a cause leading up to American involvement in the First Vietnam War, and will be sure to interest scholars in the fields of fields of diplomatic studies, international relations, diplomatic history and Cold War history.

The twenty-first century is witnessing a truly transnational revival of a very old set of ideas. Despite romantic attachments to old symbols, these late modern nationalism movements are not simply replicas of the previous two waves of nationalism in the 1860s and 1920s. Nor is it true that today's nationalism movements want simply to return to the past and effect a nationalist 1930s-style retrenchment. From Putin's macho revivalism, through to Trump's shocking victory and Xi's strongman regionalism, nationalists engage with the economic context of our time and address issues born of globalization. Crucially, in their vision for international relations they seek the destruction of key international norms in a drive to restore a vision of sovereignty predicated on a survivalist understanding of state power.Global Nationalism, edited and framed by Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen, brings together the latest research by up-and-coming early career researchers and scholars. Beginning with a succinct history and typology of contemporary nationalism and its predecessors, this book offers analysis of several cases of contemporary nationalism, examining how specific movements define identity, address grievances and propose identity-based solutions. Key themes and lessons emerge from the study of a variety of cases, from the very ideas animating nationalist thought, to their expression in a wide variety of nationalist movements around the world. The reflections on the ecosystem of nationalist ideas and movements offered in this volume are a vital starting point in the study of contemporary nationalism as a global twenty-first century phenomenon.