Development at War

Grinnell College Dean Michael Latham will deliver the Scholars’ Convocation titled "Development at War: The United States and Modernization in South Vietnam."

His talk examines how the U.S. responded to global decolonization in the midst of the Cold War, and the role that concepts of development played in American strategic thinking.

“I’m interested in the fundamental ideas that have guided the way the U.S. thinks about the rest of the world,” says the history professor.

The lecture will be held at noon Wednesday, Nov. 12 in the Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101.

Diverse models of economic development and social change became the subject of intense Cold War competition between the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and China, he says.

“That bridge between development, security concerns, and warfare appears in many other cases too,” he says. “You see it today in the way that American policymakers think about places like Iraq and Afghanistan.”

American liberals may indeed have had altruistic ambitions in terms of raising living standards and fighting poverty, but the U.S. also promoted economic development as a way to solve its concerns about security, he says. It often did so in ways that produced profoundly undemocratic and illiberal results, he says. He cites Vietnam as a classic example.

“The U.S was trying to create in South Vietnam a country where one had never existed before,” he says. “Trying to promote development not only to create and sustain a government, but win a devastating war.”

Latham’s talk is part of the ongoing Scholars’ Convocation series, which was created in the late 1970s.