Asia & the Pacific

Fredrik Logevall and Julian Zelizer argue that when thinking about Lyndon Johnson, the negative lessons from his presidency are as important as positive ones.

Fredrik Logevall is one of the experts who was asked by Politico to examine the life and legacy of Henry Kissinger.

It remains one of the most tantalizing questions of John F. Kennedy's legacy: if he had survived his trip to Dallas in November 1963, would he have withdrawn U.S. military advisers from Vietnam? The possibility that Kennedy would have avoided the epic mistake of plunging the U.S. into a land war in Southeast Asia continues to stir debate among historians.  Professor Fredrik Logevall is interviewed.

Calder Walton says both seek to topple the United States from atop world stage, with China's blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing the greater threat.

Grant Golub writes: For decades, Washington has called on U.S. allies to sustain greater shares of the defense burden while largely neglecting to take concrete actions to make this happen. This has helped allow other countries to become dependent on American military protection while letting their own defense capabilities atrophy.

A Better Peace welcomes Nate Moir to discuss his book, Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare, which analyses Fall's life to understand what drove his thinking and understanding of the situation. He joins host John Nagl to explain how Fall was consistently ahead of the conventional wisdom.

Nathaniel L. Moir explains why, given the U.S. military’s recent prioritization of large-scale combat operations, Howard University Professor and former French Resistance fighter Bernard Fall's thoughts about a similar prioritization of conventional warfare in Vietnam seem prescient. 

Fredrik Logevall describes the legacy of the Paris Peace Accords, which effectively put an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, as the 50th anniversary of the accords nears.

Many accounts of the formation of American and British grand strategy during World War II between the fall of France and the Pearl Harbor attacks stress the differences between the two sides’ strategic thinking. These accounts argue that while the Americans favored a 'direct' Germany-first approach to defeating the Axis powers, the British preferred the 'indirect' or 'peripheral' method. However, a review of Anglo-American strategic planning in this period shows that before official U.S. wartime entry, both sides largely agreed the British 'peripheral' approach was the wisest grand strategy for winning the war.

Grant Golub argues that the root cause of the so-called pivot to Asia's failure is Washington's continued belief that U.S. power and interests are global and universal. If U.S. decisionmakers truly seek to reorient U.S. strategic priorities, they need a clear hierarchy of the country's interests and obligations.