The Paris Peace Accords: Lessons for Today?
On January 27, 1973 the Paris Peace Conference agreed to U.S. withdrawal of all troops and advisors from Vietnam, withdrawal of all foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, and a ceasefire throughout Vietnam. It is inherently significant — as the culmination of a failed U.S. enterprise that cost vast sums of money and millions of lives. It is also relevant to the present on the question of “betraying” an ally — as applied not only to U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but to the U.S. engagement in Ukraine and the implicit commitment to persevere. Join a conversation of eminent historians to unpack and examine the meaning and lessons of the end of U.S. combat in Vietnam, 50 years later. Featuring Hofstra University historian Carolyn Eisenberg, author of the just published Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia, and Arnold Isaacs, Vietnam war correspondent and author of Without Honor. Andrew Bacevich, Vietnam veteran, historian and co-founder and Chair of the Quincy Institute, will moderate.
Panelists
Carolyn Eisenberg
Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is a Professor of US History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of the just published Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia. A previous history, Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49, won the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Herbert Hoover Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Prize. Her analysis has appeared in the New York Times, National Public Radio, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has been a consultant to several members of Congress and is legislative coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.
Arnold Isaacs
Arnold Isaacs is the author of two books relating to the Vietnam war — Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (updated and reissued in November 2022) and Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy. He has also written From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans and Afghan Americans in Post-9/11 America (online at www.fromtroubledlands.net). He was a reporter, foreign and national correspondent, and editor for the Baltimore Sun. During six years as the Sun's correspondent in Asia, he covered the closing years of the Vietnam war and traveled throughout Southeast and South Asia. Since leaving daily journalism he has taught or conducted training programs for journalists and journalism students in more than 20 countries.
Andrew Bacevich (Moderator)
Andrew Bacevich co-founded the Quincy Institute in 2019 and is the Chairman of the institution’s board of directors. He is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and Princeton, he served in the army before becoming an academic. Bacevich is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books, among them: The New American Militarism (2005), The Limits of Power (2008), Washington Rules (2010), America’s War for the Greater Middle East (2016), The Age of Illusions (2020), After the Apocalypse (2021), and Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out against America’s Forever Wars (2022).