NONFICTION : VIETNAM AND THE SOVIET UNION: ANATOMY OF AN ALLIANCE by Douglas Pike (Westview: $29.95; 254 pp.).

We all know that the United States messed up in Vietnam. We were not the only ones. Douglas Pike’s ongoing refrain is that everybody did--China, Russia and Hanoi.

According to Pike, Chinese dealings with Hanoi “were never skillfully handled.” For its part, Hanoi unnecessarily and unwisely outraged the Chinese and lurched into a Soviet embrace in 1977-’78: “The Hanoi-Beijing face-off came about not by choice but by error, on the part of both.” As for the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War and its aftermath “have imprisoned the two countries in an association that future historians may judge not in the interest of either.” By the mid-1980s, the annual cost of Vietnam to the Soviet Union was running at $4-$6 billion a year, and Soviet assistance measures--far from being “lighthouses of Soviet-Vietnamese fraternal love”--were becoming galling manifestations of dependency on the “barbarians.” The author visited Moscow recently, discussed Vietnam, and left convinced that “official Soviet opinions of Vietnam, from which will flow important future decisions, are simple, neat, and wrong.” Over a thousand years, Pike says, “no nation . . . has ever had a successful relationship with the Vietnamese.”

Pike’s book reveals the elusiveness of fact and judgment that Vietnam’s modern history seems to engender. We do not even know where Ho Chi Minh was during most of the 1930s. Pike’s credentials as a student of Vietnam are impressive, by the way, and his scholarly excavations have been extensive. His command of Soviet politics is less sure, but his book taken as a whole is perceptive and worth a thoughtful reading.