Genocide as Intervention from Afar: The United States and Vietnam in Comparative Context

In this article, I argue that US policy during the Vietnam war, which led to the death of roughly a million Vietnamese civilians and the destruction of much of the South Vietnamese countryside, bears many of the features of a genocide. I assess the Vietnamese case in the context of changing scholarly and legal understandings of genocide, which have come to emphasize the outcomes and evolution of genocidal policy rather than the presence of some kind of master-plan at the outset. In doing so, I focus on the Vietnamese case as one carried out by a geographically distant power employing massive amounts of violence in a sovereign nation. This approach aligns well with current scholarly perspectives because it emphasizes the distinction between high-level decisions—mostly made in Washington, DC—and lower-level decisions made in Saigon and the Vietnamese countryside. In this context, my analysis focuses on policies and approaches such as body count, free-fire zones, the infamous Mere Gook Rule, and, more generally, the unprecedentedly indiscriminate use of everything from bullets and bombs to napalm and defoliants. It underscores that these lower-level policies and practices have a great deal in common with the extermination-based dynamics observed by scholars of comparative genocide in other cases.