National liberation by other means: US visitor diplomacy in the Vietnam War

Abstract This article considers Americans who travelled to North Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War (1965–75). It demonstrates, on the basis of revelations in files from the Vietnamese national archives, that authorities in Hanoi exercised far more control over visits by US citizens and the impressions they created than the visitors themselves and those who have written about them had heretofore surmised. In visiting North Vietnam on Hanoi’s very specific terms, guests unwittingly — for the most part — became accomplices in its ‘diplomatic struggle’, a distinctive aspect of the Vietnamese communist anti-American strategy that was intended to diminish the importance of the military contest inside Vietnam by winning hearts and minds and demonizing Washington policy makers outside the country. By elucidating Hanoi’s rationale for and contributions in arranging the visits, the article decentres the history of the Vietnam War and validates the emergent consensus among international relations historians that traditionally marginalized ‘Third World’ state and non-state actors assumed meaningful roles in shaping the post-1945 international order. The Vietnam War, it turned out, changed the global discourse on the laws of war, human rights and humanitarianism in no small part because of the way Hanoi framed the conflict and reported its dreadful effects to foreign publics.