History faculty at Hoover Institution Workshop

Professor Pierre Asselin, Ph.D., was an invited participant in the third annual workshop entitled “China and Its Neighbors: What History Can Tell Policymakers,” Aug. 3-7 at Stanford University.

He demonstrated that the ongoing dispute with Beijing over the South China Sea has become a paramount foreign policy concern for Hanoi owing not to the strategic and economic value of contested islands there but to the burden of history, which mandates that Hanoi never again be servile before China, especially on matters affecting its sovereignty.

Asselin’s latest book, “Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965,” has just been released in paperback format from the University of California Press.  He is currently completing a textbook on the Vietnam War to be published next year by Cambridge University Press.