The Soviet-Afghan War and the Shadow of Vietnam

FAIN: FT-278123-21

Jonathan Brunstedt
Texas A & M University, College Station (College Station, TX 77843-0001)

Research and writing toward a monograph examining the cultural legacies of the Vietnam (1961–75) and Soviet-Afghan (1979–89) wars.

My project is a book-length historical examination of the entangled cultural legacies of the Vietnam (1961–75) and Soviet-Afghan (1979–89) wars. While Vietnam became a crude metaphor for military quagmire that observers readily applied to Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, my project pursues the far deeper cultural connections between the wars. Building on Michael Rothberg's concept of "multidirectional memory," my book will explore the dynamic process by which the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and by extension American and Soviet political identities, were continuously framed in relation to one another. The project's core hypothesis is that the Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy was central to how Americans and Soviet Russians negotiated both the meaning of these two conflicts and their countries’ place in the world. As I contend, these negotiations hastened the USSR’s collapse and fueled the revival of an American exceptionalism that outlived the Cold War itself.