Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam

2. The Crucible of Southern Vietnamese Nationalism and America’s Cold War

Chapter 2 The Crucible of Southern Vietnamese Nationalism and America’s Cold War On February 1, 1950, a U.S. State Department working group penned the following justification for providing American military aid to France for its war in Indochina: Unavoidably the United States is, together with France, committed in Indochina. That is, failure of the French Bao Dai “experiment” would mean the communization of Indochina. It is Bao Dai (or a similar anticommunist successor) or Ho Chi Minh (or a similar communist successor); there is no other alternative.The choice confronting the United States is to support the French in Indochina or face the extension of Communism over the remainder of the continental area of Southeast Asia and, possibly, farther westward.1 This logic represented a sharp departure from that which informed previousAmerican policy.Until then,theTruman administration had resisted getting involved directly in France’s military effort to reclaim its former colony.Not only did the war carry the taint of traditional colonialism,odious to most Americas, but Indochina seemed far removed from Washington’s ColdWar national security concerns. However, that would change abruptly The Crucible of Southern Vietnamese Nationalism 41 following the victory of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and even more so after both China and the Soviet Union recognized Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam in January 1950.Secretary of State Dean Acheson claimed that the Soviet recognition of Vietnam’s communist movement “should remove any illusions as to the ‘nationalist’ nature of Ho Chi Minh’s aims and reveals Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.”2 The United States therefore saw no choice but to commit its support to the new Frenchbacked State of Vietnam headed by former emperor Bao Dai. Ironically,Washington reached the conclusion that Indochina was critical to its larger Cold War strategy of containment just as France began to grow tired of its protracted war against theViet Minh.The outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 heightened American anxieties about the spread of communism inAsia and helped France persuade theTruman administration that its war against the Viet Minh was a crucial battle against Sino-Soviet expansion.3 Over the next four years, as the war-weary French moved steadily toward the conclusion that the conflict was not worth its financial or political cost,Washington increased its economic support to France and pressured it to continue the fight against falling dominoes in SoutheastAsia. In keeping with its longstanding objection to colonial rule, the United States pressed the French to grant greater independence to the noncommunist nationalist government they had established in Saigon.Yet Washington’s reasons for doing so had much more to do withVietnam’s perceived strategic significance within the ColdWar international system,and fears that the United States might be losing ground to the Soviet Union in a competition for the allegiance of the rapidly decolonizing world,than with any concern over Vietnam’s internal affairs. American diplomats knew little, and cared little,about the long history of cultural,political,and social heterodoxy that led to the fractious composition of southern society by the early 1950s. Americans thus failed to recognize the perils inherent in trying to silence southern Vietnam’s disparate voices and impose centralized control at the expense of independent power groups like the Cao Dai, Hoa Hoa, and Binh Xuyen,as theViet Minh had tried and failed to do in the aftermath of the August Revolution.The more deeply American diplomats waded into Vietnam’s domestic political milieu, the more frustrated they became with the divisive nature of southernVietnamese politics. Rather than search for ways to cooperate with or even appease politico-religious leaders and their noncommunist nationalist allies,U.S.officials dismissed them as venal,inept, immoral, and politically immature. 42 Chapter 2 Meanwhile, theVietnamese politicians that U.S. officials so readily and repeatedly discounted were well aware of the international dimension of their domestic conflict and made efforts to manipulate it to their advantage. In 1947 they participated in a coalition that appealed to French and American political sensibilities in hopes of advancing their plan to install former emperor Bao Dai at the head of a noncommunist Vietnamese nationalist government. By 1953, they recognized that French domestic politics, combined with recent changes to the international system, would soon compel Paris to end the war. Moreover, they came...