Military Review English Edition July-August 2014 | Page 94

BEFORE THE QUAGMIRE: American Intervention
in Laos 1954-1961
William J. Rust, University Press of Kentucky,
Lexington, 2012, 323 pages, $40.00.

I

f you want a new idea, read an old book. Similarly,
if you seek new ideas on current and future
foreign policy issues, take a moment to review
a book on a previous foreign policy. Though not the
author’s stated intent, it’s hard not to make parallels
between many of today’s current foreign policy issues
and American policy in Laos in the 1950s. In Before the
Quagmire, journalist and author William Rust takes a
historical look at American involvement in Laos and
examines how a small foreign policy issue was transformed into a much larger conflagration. He does so by
seeing Laos in the greater context of the Cold War, and
examining the internal American and Laotian decisions that ultimately set the U.S. on a course of greater
military involvement in both Laos and Vietnam.
Rust focuses this detailed history of American
policy in Laos on the years of the Ei ͕