The origins of the conflict and the first Indochina War

The origins of the Vietnam War lay in the Vietnamese struggle to free itself of French colonial rule. Following the defeat of the Japanese, on 2 September 1945 the Viet Minh, led by the veteran nationalist and communist Ho Chi Minh, declared Vietnam's independence from France and the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).

In trying to enlist the support — or at least the non-intervention — of the United States, Ho even borrowed much of the declaration from the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. However, in spite of President Franklin Roosevelt's anti-colonial statements during the Second World War, by 1946 the Americans supported France's attempts at regaining control of Indochina. Such support was in large part conditioned by the emergence of the Cold War in Europe: the United States needed France as a key West European ally throughout the late 1940s, while successive French governments stressed their need to hold on to Indochina as a key source of raw materials enabling France's economic recovery and political stability. In the late 1940s French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) was thus incorporated back into the French Empire with American acquiescence. To give the French administration a ‘local' flavour, the Emperor Bao Dai, who had been close to the Japanese during the Second World War, was installed as a nominal head of state in 1949. In early 1950 the United States officially recognized this arrangement.

The Viet Minh, however, never accepted the return of the French and orchestrated a concerted war of national liberation against them. Ho Chi Minh's need for external support in this struggle also meant that the Viet Minh — which already had strong socialist leanings (Ho himself was a founding member of the Indochinese Communist Party and had spent several years in Moscow) — moved clearly towards the socialist bloc.

The success of the Chinese Revolution was a crucial development: after 1949 the Viet Minh received increasing economic and military aid from the neighbouring People’s Republic of China (PRC). When the Sino-Soviet alliance was formed in early 1950, Moscow and Beijing both recognized the DRV as the sole legitimate government of all of Vietnam. Indeed, between 1950 and 1954 the PRC was, in effect, fighting two proxy wars close to its borders: one in Korea, the other in Vietnam. By 1954 the Viet Minh had inflicted heavy casualties on the French and was poised to take control over all of Vietnam.

This was the case despite escalating American aid to the French war effort. Between 1945 and 1954 — mostly after February 1950 — the United States provided the French with substantial material and economic support worth close to $2 billion (this was approximately 40 per cent of the total American aid to France in the first post-war decade). By 1954 the Americans were covering roughly 80 per cent of the cost of the French campaign. Equally importantly, the Eisenhower administration, which had come to power in early 1953, justified this effort by reference to the so-called ‘domino theory', which postulated that if Vietnam ‘fell' under communist rule, neighbouring Laos and Cambodia would be under immediate risk, and that the other countries in South-East Asia would eventually follow. The combined effect of this threat and the already significant cost of the American investment ensured that the Eisenhower administration did not accept a unified Vietnam under the DRV's rule, even after the French suffered a major military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in early May 1954.

By 1954 war-weariness was mounting in France, while the Soviet Union, the PRC and Britain were all, for various reasons, keen to see a de-escalation of the war in Indochina. The result was that in May 1954 an international conference in Geneva that had originally been convened to discuss the future of Korea directed its attention to bringing about a negotiated solution to the fighting between France and the DRV. With representatives from France, Britain, the Soviet Union, the PRC, the United States, Bao Dai's Vietnam, the DRV, Laos and Cambodia, the conference eventually settled on an agreement.

The Geneva Accords of July 1954 introduced a cease-fire that split Vietnam into two halves, with the DRV controlling the area north of the 17th parallel, while Bao Dai's regime exerted authority over the southern half of the country. This division was only to last for a limited period until national elections were held in 1956. The Accords also provided independence to Laos and Cambodia under royal governments, and stipulated that Indochina was to be neutralized, that is, that none of its constituent parts — the two Vietnams, Laos and Cambodia — was allowed to enter into a military alliance.

People's Republic of China (PRC)

The official name of communist or mainland China. The PRC came into existence in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

see Chapter 10

Geneva Accords (July 1954)

The international agreement that provided for the withdrawal of the French and

Viet Minh to either side of the 17th parallel pending reunification elections in 1956, and for the independence of Laos and Cambodia.

Republic of Vietnam (RVN) The official name of South Vietnam until re-unification in 1975.

South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)

An alliance organized in 1954 by Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States. SEATO was created after the Geneva conference on Indochina to prevent further communist gains in the region. However, it proved of little use in the Vietnam War and was disbanded in 1977.

containment

The term coined by George Kennan for the American, and broadly Western, policy towards the Soviet Union (and communism in general). The overall idea was to contain the USSR (that is, keep it within its current borders) with the hope that internal division, failure or political evolution might end the perceived threat from what was considered a chronically expansionist force.

The United States, however, refused to endorse the July 1954 Geneva Accords (in part because it would have implied the recognition of the PRC, which the United States still treated as a diplomatic nonentity).

Instead, the United States started supporting the construction of an independent non-communist regime in South Vietnam. Washington backed the new South Vietnamese prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, who quickly moved to undermine Bao Dai. In 1955 Diem refused a North Vietnamese call for talks about the prospective national elections the following year. Instead, he held his own referendum on turning the South into the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) with himself as president, and won an astonishing — and clearly fraudulent — 98.2 per cent of the vote (including 600,000 votes from the Saigon electoral district, which only had 450,000 eligible voters). The Eisenhower administration not only supported Diem with financial aid and a growing cohort of military advisers but also established the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954. The major purpose of SEATO — whose membership included the United States, France, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Pakistan and the Philippines — was to ‘contain’ the PRC and its efforts to support communist revolutionaries in Indochina. In short, by the mid- 1950s, the United States had extended the containment doctrine to South-East Asia. The inevitable result was that in subsequent years the division of Vietnam — as well as the future of Laos and Cambodia — became the linchpin of the globalized Cold War where the East-West confrontation and decolonization, as well as regional nationalism and communism, fuelled a long and deadly conflict.

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Source: Best Antony. International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Routledge,2008. — 638 p.. 2008

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