The Pre-History of the Vietnam War: Colonialism to Cold War

Background

Colonial regimes were crumbling, and former European powers strategized their best means of extricating themselves from difficult situations. Several decades after the Bolshevik Revolution, communist regimes burgeoned and penetrated East Asia. Coupled with the rise of nationalism, communism helped to stoke the ideals of many Vietnamese people, particularly in the North. Moreover, the fusion of nationalism and communism allowed Vietnam to construct a modern identity from the ashes of colonial rule. Without the benefit of hindsight, American actors in the wake of World War Two failed to fully understand what was taking place in Indochina.

Anti-Colonialism and the Rise of the Viet Minh

Anti-colonialism and decolonization were trending across Asia and the wider world by the end of the Second World War. India enjoyed its liberation from the British crown, yet Vietnam struggled to extricate itself from French rule. Impotent French colonial officials failed utterly to take note of the strong and increasingly well-organized anti-colonial movements brewing in Hanoi. Early players included Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, both of whom became critical anti-French, anti-colonialist leaders (Nguyen, 2012). It is unlikely that any American paid much attention to Indochina after the First World War, when the anti-colonialist movement began to congeal in earnest. In fact, Ho Chi Minh and several other politically active, nationalist Vietnamese exiles lobbied for assistance in their anti-colonialist cause, but "Ho and his colleagues were ignored even by that champion of self-determination, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson" (Hunt, 2010, p. 8). Wilson "considered the far more pressing issues of German reparations, French desires for a security guarantee, and the future of the League of Nations... what happened in Southeast Asia was distinctly secondary" (Schulzinger, 1997, pp. 8–9). The initial revolutionary sentiment in Vietnam was thus summarily ignored by the international community.

When Le Duan and Le Duc Tho became political prisoners, the French inadvertently turned them into heroes. The United States, meanwhile, had a great many other issues to preoccupy itself with — not least the domestic policies designed to alleviate the Great Depression. Vietnam still did not register as a place of strategic importance for Americans. The moment when America would truly have started to take notice was during World War Two, when the Eastern Front began to heat up.

From Vietnam's point of view, being occupied by both France and Japan was intolerable — even more humiliating than the previous generations of colonial oppression (Nguyen, 2012). The threat of two colonial powers battling over the future of Vietnam gave rise to the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, also known as the Viet Minh (Nguyen, 2012). The Viet Minh represented the first significant blip on the American radar, not only because of American involvement in countering Japanese imperialism throughout the region, but also because it was after the Japanese were ousted that Vietnam seized its moment and launched the August Revolution of 1945 (Nguyen, 2012). Vietnam became more determined than ever to assert its right to self-determination, though it had yet to find its defining figurehead leader.