VIETNAM WAR

Vietnam War

Vietnam War

Introduction

At the end of World War II, Europe's old colonial powers expelled the Japanese from South Asia, only to find themselves faced with a wave of indigenous national liberation movements. In Malaya, the British fought a successful counterinsurgency against communist guerrillas, but the Dutch were much less fortunate in Indonesia, where they were forced to grant the country independence in 1949. In Indochina, the French waged a prolonged, painful, and ultimately futile war with the communist Viet Minh. When the French army found itself surrounded and desperate at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Paris appealed to the United States for help, specifically for air support.

By that time the cold war colored every aspect of American foreign policy, and U.S. diplomats and policy makers certainly viewed the insurgency in French Indochina as part of the Moscow-backed worldwide communist campaign to undermine the West's liberal democracies and take control everywhere they could. Thus, for the first time, American leaders began talking about Indochina as a "domino." If it fell, they reasoned, the rest of Southeast Asia would topple into the communist camp as well. Despite his belief in the "Domino Theory," U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower was reluctant to send American troops into Asian jungles, to arrogate—as Harry S. Truman had in Korea—war-making powers to the Oval Office, or to sacrifice so valuable a Cold War asset as the U.S. reputation for being basically an anti-imperialist nation. Besides, neither he nor the American public wanted another Korea.

Eisenhower responded to French reversals at the hands of Ho Chi Minh's communist forces in the north by sending the aid to rescue trapped French forces and stop the fighting. His ultimate goal, however, was to partition Indochina, as the best strategy to "contain" Ho Chi Minh's communist Viet Minh. Following the French collapse, a new premier, Pierre Mendes-France, agreed to meet in Geneva and work out some kind of international accord. In a diplomatic farce, various states attending the Geneva Conference of 1954 did not recognize others; the United States for example, did not recognize as legitimate the People's Republic of China, or the French the Viet Minh government. There they were, nevertheless, negotiating the 10 documents that went to make up three military agreements, six unilateral declarations, and a Final Declaration to end the fighting (Gallucci, 1975).

The United States, in unilateral declarations, repudiated important sections of these accords and refused to sign any of the agreements of the Final Declaration. The Geneva Agreements, as a collection of documents, in fact, contained no actual treaty binding on all participants, and certainly no political treaties as such were signed. This made the agreements unusual by treaty standards and probably unique in modern times. In any case, the military agreements imposed by the accords divided Vietnam into two parts, a Democratic Republic controlling the north and recognized only by the Soviet Union and China, and the Republic of Vietnam uneasily holding sway in the south. Elections were set for ...