ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 reevaluates Taiwan’s relations with South Vietnam and its engagement in the Vietnam War. Countering the widely held view that the Chinese Nationalists went out of their way to assist their “brotherly” Vietnamese partner owing to a joint anticommunist cause, this chapter scrutinizes how the Vietnam War served Taipei’s geostrategic purposes, helped the exportation of anticommunist political ideology, facilitated KMT’s intelligence activities, and revitalized Chiang Kai-shek’s irredentist discourse. It also demonstrates how the war in Indochina was transformed from a useful political asset in terms of KMT’s international and domestic propaganda into a source of friction in Taiwan’s Cold War diplomacy. In historical hindsight, the Vietnam War and the issues surrounding it stand out as a double-edged sword that both cemented and thwarted the U.S.–Taiwan alliance.
