Analysis Of The Vietnam War: A Concise International History By Mark Atwood Lawrence

The Vietnam War: A concise International History. By Mark Atwood Lawrence. (Oxford
University Press, 2008)

The author takes the book into the next level while explaining things about the Vietnam War, which he also states is sometimes known as the Second Indochina War. He attempts to explain what caused the war to start, America’s standpoint during the war and the aftermath of the war. The introduction of the book has numerous questions at the beginning like if it was actually a War or a Conflict. Lawrence’s thesis involves around, What the basic motives were for this war. Since this is the time of the USSR and communist, they were trying to make the communist party even bigger. All Lawrence wanted from this book was for more knowledge to come to the people around the world. On page four the author states, “ The goal of this book, then, is to strike a balance by examining the American role within a broadly international coherence.”

So many other people are present in Vietnam such as the Chinese and then the American presence they don’t have much control. Lawrence takes time to analyze each part of who is in Vietnam such as the North and South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, Russians, Chinese and American like I had already stated. The president at the time, Johnson, thought it was a good idea to achieve victory by escalating the about of bombings in the North. While bombings were a normal thing during this war the North had started using guerilla warfare. The author explains this by using maps of the area and looks at the effects that the foreign policy is having on the country since so many were antiwar at this