Fine della Guerra fredda in Asia. Pechino, Mosca e Hanoi al tempo del Vietnam (1964-1969)

In the second part of the sixties, the Vietnam War was not simply a phase in the clash between the West and the communist world but it was in the first place a civil war involving the whole of Vietnamese society and, secondarily, taking on an international dimension. However, it was not a proxy war between the USSR, China and the United States, in the context of the Cold War: in Hanoi, in particular, the communist leadership sought rather to bend to its advantage the rivalries that divided the superpowers, securing economic and military aid from both China and the Soviet Union. The conflict was therefore not a simple “American adventure”, but a war initiative planned by Hanoi to achieve national reunification and to make her political and ideological reasons prevail. In Hanoi, moreover, military
strategy intertwined with political struggle within the Communist Party to influence the relations with Moscow and Beijing in a nationalist logic. For these reasons, the Vietnam War, far from being directed by Moscow or Beijing, was a decisive factor in influencing the balance between the two communist powers and contributing to accentuate their conflict to the extreme consequences of armed confrontation and - at the end of a path difficult to predict in the early sixties - of the subversion of international alliances.