Selling Vietnam: The European colonial powers and the origins of the American commitment to Vietnam, 1944-1950

Scholars have sought for years to explain why the U.S. government made fateful decisions in the 1940s and 1950s to commit American power in Vietnam, where the United States had few apparent interests. One argument contends that the Truman administration was driven by determination to protect its most important allies, France and Britain, which had major political and economic motives to defeat Vietnamese nationalism.; Although many historians now accept this interpretation, none has examined the relationship among Washington, Paris and London regarding Indochina over the years leading up to the U.S. decision in 1950 to send military and economic aid to Vietnam. This study, the first to combine French, British and American sources, argues that the U.S. commitment was largely the result of six years of diplomacy by the European colonial powers calculated to achieve that result.; The French and British governments emerged from the Second World War determined to restore French rule in Indochina but materially weakened and politically divided, utterly lacked the means to do so. Their solution was to enlist U.S. power on behalf of European colonialism. Although French and British diplomats followed different approaches to achieve that objective, their efforts tended to reinforce each other in influencing U.S. behavior.; Between 1944 and 1946, they successfully exploited indecision within the State Department to obtain limited U.S. military assistance for French forces trying to resubjugate Indochina. After 1946, they discovered a much more effective method: manipulating growing American anticommunism. By constructing an image of Vietnamese nationalists as Moscow-directed communists and creating an apparent pro-Western alternative, French officials in particular convinced the U.S. administration to support French policies ultimately designed to prolong colonial rule.; The French and British success in selling their version of events in Southeast Asia helps explain the genesis of the assumptions that would underpin later American involvement in Vietnam. More broadly, it suggests the dominant role played by the European powers---and the surprisingly feckless role of the United States---in expanding Cold War precepts to the Third World.