Contact: Ann Marie Deer Owens, (615) 322-2706
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Fall of Saigon played ironic role in demise of Cold War, says Vanderbilt historian
While the fall of Saigon was one of the lowest points in recent American history, it helped set in motion the collapse of the Soviet empire 15 years later, according to Thomas Schwartz, an expert in recent U.S. foreign policy, especially during the Vietnam War.
Schwartz, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt, says that while the defeat in South Vietnam did contribute to the fall of some other nations to Communism, it proved not to be as cataclysmic as proponents of the "domino theory" feared. He notes that the true irony of the fall of Saigon was that it encouraged the Soviet Union to be overconfident about its goals for the Third World. This led to an overextension of the Soviet Union's own resources in Africa, Afghanistan and other parts of the world that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, he argues.
Schwartz recently visited Vietnam as part of a delegation from the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., that has tried without success to obtain war documents from the Vietnamese a quarter of a century after the war's end. He says that Vietnam remains very closed in intellectual and political terms, despite the resumption of relations and more economic ties with the United States.
Schwartz teaches courses on the Vietnam War and is currently writing a book on U.S. relations with Europe during Lyndon Johnson's presidency. He can be reached at (615) 343-4328 or at [email protected].
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