| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Douglas A. Borer. Superpowers Defeated: Vietnam and Afghanistan Compared. Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass. 1999. Pp. xxiii, 261. $57.50.

For Douglas A. Borer, history matters. The origins of American defeat in Vietnam and Soviet failure in Afghanistan can be traced in large part to questions of legitimacy of the local regimes, and these can be traced to the history of the two countries. Given their notions of a "civilizing mission," the French in Vietnam and later the Russians in Afghanistan imposed on themselves a burden of assimilation that made it almost a certainty that they would fail. The British Empire ruled India, he reminds us, with about 3,500 administrators. The French needed many more to rule Indochina "their way." The United States inherited the problem the French created and tried to find a way out of the dilemma in Vietnam. But the more it sought to preserve democracy and stop communism, the more it committed itself to an increasingly antidemocratic regime. The Russians went into Afghanistan in the Soviet era, he suggests, out of pride and opportunity, and became entangled in propping up a communist regime that had willy-nilly grown out of military aid programs. . . .

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