Europe Made Us Do It: The Origins of U.S. Involvement in Vietman

Mark Atwood Lawrence. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xii + 358. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.

For students and instructors of U.S. history, the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1940s have been difficult to pinpoint and their significance has remained muddy. The events and spillovers of the 1950s and 1960s are clearer: they range from Eisenhower's embrace of the anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem to Kennedy's skeptical abandonment of Diem to Lyndon Johnson's choice of open bombing and U.S. troop support. On the earlier period, when the French did the fighting in what was then called Indochina (1947–1954), most instructors are satisfied with explaining to their students that the United States paid for about three-quarters of France's war. But why and how did Washington back France's attempt to retain its empire in Southeast Asia? After all, the policy ran counter not only to the United States's anti-colonial rhetoric but also to many of its priorities after World War II.

The answer that Mark Atwood Lawrence gives in this deeply researched, persuasively argued, and elegantly written book is that France and Great Britain played a heretofore unacknowledged role in pulling the United States into the morass of Southeast Asia. The two European Allies exerted diplomatic pressure, manipulated U.S. policy, and re-cast a regional anti-colonial struggle into a defining battleground of the global Cold War.

Lawrence divides his narrative into two stages, "Contesting Vietnam," from 1945 to mid-1947, and "Constructing Vietnam," from mid-1947 up to the outbreak of the Korean War in mid-1950. The first stage tells a story of discord between U.S., French, British, and sometimes Asian officials. At the end of World War II, French interests in re-taking Indochina from the occupying Japanese were predictable and prosaic. French investors wanted to continue exploiting rice, tin, and rubber resources, while nationalist Gaullists in Paris saw in Indochina a way to regain prestige and power lost during the war. The French did consider granting limited autonomy to Ho Chi Minh's nationalist movement, but always while trying to maintain control over the economy and government of Vietnam.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, grew divided between "liberals" who wanted to end French rule over Indochina and "conservatives" who were content to let France re-claim its colony. Both groups agreed that a kind of anti-colonial era had arrived, but also that the United States could benefit from the material resources in Indochina. While Franklin Roosevelt was alive, the liberal option prevailed. It encouraged a vaguely defined trusteeship over Indochina, and U.S. forces blocked the French from end-of-war planning in Southeast Asia. After Roosevelt's death and the Japanese surrender, however, conservatives gained ground, led by the Office of West European Affairs against the liberals of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. But U.S. bureaucrats remained too divided for action. Policy ground to a halt—"passive neutrality," the author calls it—with Washington almost wholly unwilling to commit resources to either dislodge the French or shore them up (p. 138).¹

In the middle of this French-U.S. divide were the British. On one hand, they were sympathetic to what they saw as a Vietnamese leadership that could be encouraged to join the Western camp through an autonomous union with France. They also recognized the overwhelming ability of the United States to dictate postwar affairs. On the other, British officials feared that their own supply of rice, their shipping lanes, and their lines of communication could be jeopardized by an independent Vietnam. They also wished for the quick recovery of France as an ally and dreaded the example that de-colonization might present to their own subjects in Malaya...