The Vietnam War

At first, it was like numerous post-1945 ‘small wars’ waged by Western powers trying to cling onto empire in a changing world. They may have been viewed through a Cold War lens and sold to a sceptical public as wars against ‘the spread of Communism’. But ‘the domino theory’ did not alter the basic truth: these were colonial wars against people fighting for national independence, social reform, and human dignity. There were dozens of them – in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, across Asia as a whole. But a few swelled into major insurgencies that sent shockwaves back into the imperial heartlands. Algeria was one: the blowback caused France’s Fourth Republic to c