Superpowers Defeated: Vietnam and Afghanistan Compared

ISBN-13: 9780714648514 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 262 str.

Douglas A. Borer

Opis

Was Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam? Was Vietnam the American Afghanistan? During the Cold War, military conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan validated the crucial importance of war in global power dynamics. After approximately a decade of intense effort, military intervention proved too costly in human and material terms to be politically sustainable for the USA and USSR. In the end, both superpowers were thwarted in obtaining their original war goals and withdrew in disgrace. As a result, the parallelism between the US experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is now a widely accepted truism. But is it so?

Spis treści

Military

"Expertly comparing the impact of military intervention on the domestic political legitimacy and international credibility of the superpowers, the author helps the reader to gain a better understanding of these wars as very similar but quite different events."



Millenium

"Borer provides a thoughtful and informative comparison, leading to a stronger understanding, of the Vietnam and Afghan Wars"



Indochina Chronology

"challenges the widely held notion that there is great parallelism between the two wars"



American Historical Review

"will command attention for both Cold War scholars and International Historians"



"the first comprehensive comparative study of the Vietnam and Afghan conflicts... it is a piece of scholarship that deserves to be read and debated widely"

- Journal of Cold War Studies

O autorze

Douglas A. Borer