"In this reinterpretation of America's most disastrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes the state orthodoxies of the left and the right and puts the Vietnam War in its proper context - as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cold War, he argues, was actually the third world war of the twentieth century, and the proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan were its major campaigns."--BOOK JACKET. "Lind offers a provocative reassessment of why the United States failed in Vietnam despite the high stakes. The ultimate responsibility for defeat lies not with the civilian policy elite nor with the press but with the military establishment, which failed to adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war."--BOOK JACKET.