With Vietnam’s emergence as a pivotal player in Asia, we are able to view the Vietnam War in the context of the US strategy of global containment, which led it to defend not only South Vietnam, but also South Korea and Taiwan – “the three fronts,” as Mao Zedong put it. Then and now, Vietnam was the locus of a struggle between the vision of a monolithic Asia and that of an Asia that is open internally and to the world.