UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Edwin A. Martini

A provocative reassessment of postwar American policy toward Vietnam

Beginning where most histories of the Vietnam War end, Invisible Enemies examines the relationship between the United States and Vietnam following the American pullout in 1975. Drawing on a broad range of sources, from White House documents and congressional hearings to comic books and feature films, Edwin Martini shows how the United States continued to wage war on Vietnam "by other means" for another twenty-five years. In addition to imposing an extensive program of economic sanctions, the United States opposed Vietnam's membership in the United Nations, supported the Cambodians, including the Khmer Rouge, in their decade-long war with the Vietnamese, and insisted that Vietnam provide a "full accounting" of American MIAs before diplomatic relations could be established. According to Martini, such policies not only worked against some of the stated goals of U.S. foreign policy, they were also in opposition to the corporate economic interests that ultimately played a key role in normalizing relations between the two nations in the late 1990s.

Martini reinforces his assessment of American diplomacy with an analysis of the "cultural front"—the movies, myths, memorials, and other phenomena that supported continuing hostility toward Vietnam while silencing opposing views of the war and its legacies. He thus demonstrates that the "American War on Vietnam" was as much a battle for the cultural memory of the war within the United States as it was a lengthy economic, political, and diplomatic campaign to punish a former adversary.

"Original, lucid, and convincing—a powerful indictment of the vindictive postwar policies the United States leveled against the one nation that successfully resisted the heaviest bombing in world history."

Christian G. Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War
Remembered from All Sides

"There are not a lot of books that cover this subject, and none cover it so comprehensively. It is enormously valuable to have in one place a treatment of high-level political debates over diplomatic recognition and popular perceptions of Vietnam as rendered by Hollywood."

Andrew J. Rotter, author of The Path to Vietnam: The Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia

Edwin A. Martini is assistant professor of history at Western Michigan University.

American History / American Studies
296 pp.
$24.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-609-5
$80.00s library cloth edition, ISBN 13: 978-1-55849-608-8
October 2007

A volume in the series Culture, Politics, and the Cold War

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