This chapter describes the immediate aftermath of the Vietnamese invasion. Apart from the ongoing war in Cambodia, the immediate, violent response to the Vietnamese invasion was the February 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war.

By the early 1960s, Vietnam was firmly lodged in China's embrace. Khrushchev's commitment to Vietnam was limited, as he focused instead on relations with the United States. However, after his ouster in October 1964, Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, began to see Vietnam as an opportunity to demonstrate Moscow's revolutionary leadership. The Soviet Union's support for Vietnam served two purposes: establishing credibility in the revolutionary world and asserting its position as America's equal. As the war escalated, both Moscow and Beijing's commitment to Vietnam grew. Despite disagreements over military tactics, the Soviets won Hanoi's loyalty, largely because they supplied Vietnam with badly needed military aid. Yet the end of the war became a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets. Moscow ended up investing heavily in Vietnam's reconstruction and industrialization, which contributed to the Soviet Union's later insolvency. This chapter highlights the importance of understanding the Vietnam War not only as an East–West struggle but also as an East–East struggle, with the Soviet Union and China competing for power and influence across the region.

Chapter 4 evaluates US tactical air power from 1967 to 1968. Over North Vietnam, the Rolling Thunder air interdiction campaign struggled to isolate NVA/VC forces. Simultaneously, a strategic bombing campaign could not coerce Hanoi to withdraw its support of the insurgency. The direct attack of the NVA/VC forces in South Vietnam proved more effective, with the ultimate test occurring near the demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the US Marine base at Khe Sanh. Here, the NVA massed two divisions hoping to overrun the marines to achieve a decisive victory as they had against the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. Instead, the American combined arms campaign defeated the NVA. The massing of ground forces at Khe Sanh differed from the NVA’s previous tactics of dispersing and taking sanctuary in Laos and Cambodia. Such defensive measures had previously allowed the NVA/VC to survive but had also delayed plans to launch a General Offensive and General Uprising. When the NVA/VC finally commenced their offensive in early 1968, they failed militarily at Khe Sanh and, more broadly, in the Tet Offensive. However, more importantly, the North Vietnamese succeeded politically as American support for the war evaporated.

The Cold War and process of decolonization divided the world, with Vietnam emerging after 1954 as a center of global competition. Leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi believed that success in their revolution could tip the worldwide balance of power in favor of the socialist bloc and national liberation movements. This conviction, combined with the need to conduct diplomacy from a position of military weakness, made those leaders accomplished practitioners of international politics as they balanced commitments to Marxism-Leninism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism.

This chapter addresses how Hanoi navigated its membership and commitment to overlapping international movements at the height of the Cold War. It demonstrates that despite confronting the United States in Indochina, DRV leaders never thought strictly in terms of their own interests. Over the years they iterated and acted upon commitments to socialist internationalism, “world revolution,” and “Third Worldism” (tiermondisme). The Cold War and Sino-Soviet dispute created challenges for Hanoi, but the contemporaneous process of decolonization in the Third World also created opportunities.