User:Ben3578/sandbox

Workshop practice
The Strategic Hamlet Programme in Vietnam was closely tied to modernisation theory promoted by W.W. Rostow, underpinning US Foreign Policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Kennedy, his advisers, and the American foreign aid mission began to shift away from conventional military tactics and toward a comprehensive counterinsurgency program that integrated military action with a strategy of social engineering. By the end of 1961, the administration would become committed to defeating the Vietcong through modernisation.

In utilising the practice of modernisation, the US expressed a confidence on a global scale that it should be a “universal model for the world”. This approach "contributed directly to justifying the militaristic approach to third world politics, above all in Vietnam”.

The practice of village relocation within the Strategic Hamlet Program, holds foundations in Rostow’s modernisation theory which recommended “destroying the external supports to guerrilla insurgents”. The practice of relocation aimed to reduce the connections between the Vietcong and the Southern Vietnamese population, aiming to deter communist influence. “Modernizers aimed to replicate—by force if necessary—the stable, democratic, capitalist welfare state that they believed was being created in the United States”.

The Strategic Hamlet Program also reflected wider ideas of American Exceptionalism. In their approach towards Vietnam, the US saw itself as a moderniser and exemplary form of democracy. “The Strategic Hamlet Program projected a national identity for the US as a credible world power ready to meet revolutionary changes”. Perceptions of Vietnamese as "backwards" and subordinate to "Western Progress" resulted in the conclusion by US analysts that the Vietnamese were “incapable of self-government and vulnerable to foreign subversion".

The US media and government spokesmen presented the Strategic Hamlet Program and its projects of village relocation and social engineering as “reflections of benevolent American power”. In challenging communism against the backdrop of the Cold War, the Strategic Hamlet Program “revised older ideologies of imperialism and manifest destiny” stemming from notions of American Exceptionalism.

In aiming to deter the Vietnamese peoples from Communist and Vietcong influence, the US retained the “sense of national mission projected by an ideology of modernisation”. The US government aimed to defeat the threat of Communism in Vietnam to maintain its exceptionalist vision of “America's superior society and its transformative potential”. The adoption of modernisation theory “reflected a sense that the United States should be a universal model”.