Editor’s Note: Jan. 27 marked the 41st anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, which were intended to end direct U.S involvement in the Vietnam War.

Perceptions of the United States as eager to use its armed forces — or those of proxies — against rivals became ubiquitous during the Cold War. Forays into Latin America, alleged support for right-wing dictatorships there and elsewhere, sponsorship of coups in Indonesia, Congo, and Chile, and assistance to fanatical insurgent factions in Afghanistan during the 1980s to varying degrees created negative opinions of U.S. foreign policymaking at home and abroad, which continue today.

Arguably, most important in validating those opinions was the American military incursion into Vietnam. More than any other Cold War crisis, the Vietnam War (1965-75) generated fierce opposition to Washington’s policies domestically and internationally. This “war of choice,” opponents claimed, was wanton, predicated on false or illegitimate premises, and — most tragically — waged in a small, poor, and innocent country with devastating consequences for its people.

Such criticism of direct and indirect U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and elsewhere fails to take into account an important reality: namely, that in several crises during the Cold War and since, the “other side” had a hand in creating the circumstances that sometimes led to very tragic outcomes.

In Vietnam’s case, communist decision-makers were well aware of the risk they took when deciding in 1963-64 to dramatically escalate the insurgency in the southern half of the country in an attempt to overthrow the pro-American regime in Saigon. In this sense, the decision of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to initiate sustained bombings of the North and deploy the first of what became hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to the South was not tantamount to instigating a war of choice against communist insurgents and their leaders in Hanoi; it was instead a reaction, a response to circumstances he and the rest of his administration did not control but, in their eyes, had to be addressed given the Cold War context at the time.

To argue as critics in the 1960s and ’70s did and as revisionist historians have since that the Vietnam War was caused by the United States — or that is was “America’s war” or “Lyndon Johnson’s war” or “Richard Nixon’s war” — is symptomatic of the U.S.-centric approach to the study of international relations. It also trivializes Vietnamese agency, presuming that the Vietnamese themselves played a secondary role in shaping events that marked the history of their own country.

New archival evidence from Vietnam — some of it presented in my new book, “Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965” — and elsewhere makes abundantly clear that Ho Chi Minh and other communist leaders in Hanoi played a key role in creating the circumstances that precipitated the Vietnam War in 1965. Eleven years earlier, they had signed diplomatic accords in Geneva creating two regroupment zones separated at the 17th parallel, not only to end their long and bloody war of independence against France and preclude direct military intervention by the United States, but also because implementation of those accords stood to peacefully bring about the country’s reunification under their own governance.

The latter, in fact, represented the central objective of the Vietnamese revolution those leaders spearheaded. When the elections on reunification mandated by the accords failed to materialize owing largely to the refusal of not Washington but of its ally in Saigon, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, communist leaders began contemplating alternatives to fulfill their revolutionary objective. They eventually settled on promoting and abetting insurgent activity to subvert Diem’s regime.

To that end starting in 1959, they infiltrated the South with thousands of combatants who had regrouped to the North immediately following the signing of the Geneva accords. However, they refused for the time being to deploy units of their own standing army, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), because they feared that might prompt the United States to respond in kind. Time, they felt, was on their side.

By 1963, communist leaders were running out of patience. Despite some successes, they were no closer to achieving national reunification under their rule than they had been four years earlier. Following Diem’s assassination in a coup facilitated by Washington but staged by independent elements of the South Vietnamese armed forces in November, communist leaders decided to press the fight. Hoping to capitalize on the resulting political disarray in Saigon, the following month they promulgated “Resolution 9” calling for dramatic escalation of hostilities below the 17th parallel. Specifically, the resolution sanctioned “mass combat operations” to annihilate the South Vietnamese army.

At once, the North’s material support to southern insurgents substantially increased, and included the most sophisticated weaponry provided to date. When those initiatives failed to deliver a “decisive victory,” communist leaders made the fateful decision to deploy the first of several PAVN units to the South. Not coincidentally, the decision came just days after the so-called Tonkin Gulf Incident of August 1964, interpreted in Hanoi to mean that the window of opportunity to defeat Saigon before Washington sent it its own troops to save it was closing fast.

Communist leaders consciously decided in 1963-64 to launch a major war to fulfill their main aspiration which, it needs to be emphasized, was not just national reunification, as committed nationalists desired, but national reunification under their own aegis. Their adamant refusal to compromise on that objective, to accept national reunification under other terms, contributed to no insignificant degree to the onset of the Vietnam War in 1965.

In retrospect, it could be argued that the Vietnam War actually began in 1964 when Hanoi decided to commit its own troops to the “liberation” of the South, and it was not until the following year, ex post facto, that the United States became a party to it. In this interpretation, the Vietnam War was as much a product of Vietnamese as it was of American decision-making. It was Vietnam’s war as much as it was America’s War.

About the author: Pierre Asselin, Ph.D., is an associate professor of History at Hawaii Pacific University, a specialist of East and Southeast Asian diplomatic history and a frequent visitor to Vietnam’s historic archives. His latest book is Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (University of California Press, 2013).

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