In his talk on 5 December 219, Dr. David Anderson will discuss his new book, Vietnamization: Politics, Strategy, Legacy. “Vietnamization” was Richard Nixon’s term for the process of withdrawing US troops from Vietnam and turning over responsibility for the Vietnam War to the South Vietnamese government. The concept had far reaching implications, both for understanding Nixon’s actions and for shaping U.S. military thinking years after Washington’s failure to ensure the survival of its client state in South Vietnam. This talk summarizes Dr. David Anderson’s new book on Vietnamization that explores the political and strategic implications of the policy and its impact on American post-Vietnam foreign policy.

Dr. David L. Anderson is a senior lecturer in the National Security Affairs Department at NPS and professor of history emeritus at California State University, Monterey Bay. He is author or editor of numerous publications on the Vietnam War, including The Columbia History of the Vietnam War (Columbia University Press, 2011) and most recently Vietnamization: Politics, Strategy, Legacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). He is a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War.