To Cage the Red Dragon

Book excerpt: It is now 20 years since the Cold War effectively ended with the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern and Central Europe, and just over three decades since the final bloody climax of the Vietnam War played itself out on the streets of Saigon, Phnom Penh and Vientiane. The historiography of the wider Cold War has burgeoned accordingly, greatly assisted by increasing access to all manner of archival material belonging to former foes on both sides of what was once the Iron Curtain. That of the Vietnam War, at least insofar as the West is concerned, had already established itself as a field of significant depth and breadth by the end of the 1980s. However, it too has benefited and continued to grow in the wake of the large-scale release by many Western governments of their remaining official material from that era into the public domain.