The Universe Unraveling

The Universe Unraveling is a provocative reinterpretation of U.S.-Laos relations in the years leading up to the Vietnam War. U.S. policy toward Laos under Eisenhower and Kennedy cannot be understood apart from the traits Americans ascribed to Lao allies.

Seth Jacobs is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. He is the author of Cold War Mandarin and America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam.

The history of that period has been the subject of numerous studies. Jacobs, however, wants to get behind the narrative of American actions in Laos: the misspent aid, the attempts to build a Lao military force, the waging of covert war by the Central Intelligence Agency, the subversion of elections, the internecine rivalry of US agencies, the provision of arms which led at one point to the absurdity of Lao military factions fighting each other, each with American weapons. Jacobs handles all of that deftly and links it skillfully to the labyrinthine shifts in Lao politics.

Kenton Clymer:

Seth Jacobs has produced an exceptionally important, well researched, and compelling account of American involvement in Laos during the Dwight Eisenhower and early John F. Kennedy administrations.

Jacobs's meticulously researched study takes Laos from the periphery to the center of Cold War analysis. In his back and forth chronological approach with thematic consistency prevailing, Jacobs elucidates how a variety of Cold War policy makers saw proxy warriors as supremely inferior.... In this insightful though troubling analysis, Jacobs challenges colleagues to continue the analysis of Kennedy's having 'no intention of scaling back Washington's commitment to defend as much territory as it could from red aggression.'... Highly recommended.

Martin Stuart-Fox:

It is difficult now to conceive of how significant Laos once was in American Cold War strategic thinking.. Drawing extensively on American diplomatic sources and contemporary reporting on Laos in the American press, Seth Jacobs offers a novel explanation.. Jacobs's argument is compelling, and he writes well.

In his fascinating, lively, and well-researched study of the failures of U.S. policy in Laos Seth Jacobs accepts that decision makers in the Kennedy administration viewed Laos as a poor setting in which to mount a vigorous response to the communist menace due to its difficult terrain, overwhelming logistical challenges, and easy accessibility for North Vietnam and China. But going beyond this orthodoxy, Jacobs also makes a sustained case that cultural factors—in particular an ingrained American belief that the Lao people were feckless, indolent, disorganized, cowardly, and inherently pacific—played an even more important role than strategic considerations in convincing American policymakers that the more resilient Vietnamese (as they were viewed through an inverted cultural lens) would offer sturdier resistance to communist insurgency.

Few scholars of the Vietnam War bother to analyze the complex circumstances of wartime Laos in general, leaving it as another figurative sideshow in the region-wide conflict. In The Universe Unraveling, historian Seth Jacobs demonstrates the importance of understanding America's foreign policy toward Laos in the 1950s as a key factor in its later direct involvement in South Vietnam. Jacobs illustrates how the confused and contemptuous foreign policy of John Foster Dulles's State Department was chiefly responsible for Kennedy's ultimate decision to stay out of Laos. Jacobs argues persuasively that Washington's largely chaotic Laos policy 'bound America more tightly to its client state of South Vietnam' and thus drew it deeper into the quagmire of war there. The Universe Unraveling is an important and useful contribution to Vietnam War studies. It treats Laos as an important historical topic in its own right, while providing useful explanations as to how the United States stumbled into war in South Vietnam. And, perhaps most significantly, it serves as a powerful reminder that the attitudes and actions of a small number of American officials can have devestating consequences for a great many peoples and environments across the globe.

The Universe Unraveling is a wonderful, spellbinding account, one of those rare books that you really do not want to put down. Although the heart of Jacobs's book is about cultural attitudes, one real strength is that he integrates them into a fairly traditional diplomatic history narrative that explains cogently the intricacies of Lao politics and American policy.

Andrew J. Rotter, Charles A. Dana Professor of History, Colgate University, author of Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964:

It is impossible to understand U.S. intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s without understanding what happened in Laos between 1954 and 1962. Seth Jacobs's cultural approach to U.S.-Lao relations offers a very exciting way to analyze events in that tortured nation. Jacobs has discovered enormously suggestive evidence that the policies the United States pursued toward Laos were shaped by how U.S. policymakers thought of the Laotian people.