This critical study of US intervention in the Laotian Civil War is "a major contribution to the literature on America's Southeast Asian involvement" ( Publishers Weekly).

In the decade preceding the first US combat operations in Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration sought to defeat a communist-led insurgency in neighboring Laos. Although US foreign policy in the 1950s focused primarily on threats posed by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the American engagement in Laos evolved from a small cold war skirmish into a superpower confrontation near the end of President Eisenhower's second term. Ultimately, the American experience in Laos foreshadowed many of the mistakes made by the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s.

In Before the Quagmire, historian William J. Rust examines key policy decisions made in Washington and how they were implementation on the ground in Laos, setting the US on a path to wider war in Southeast Asia. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, Before the Quagmire documents how ineffective assistance to Laotian anticommunist elites reflected fundamental misunderstandings about the country's politics, history, and culture.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title