U.S. Involvement and
the Cold War Context: 1947–1955
Events
1947 Containment
doctrine begins to influence U.S. foreign policy
1948 USSR blockades
Berlin; United States responds with Berlin airlift
1949 USSR conducts
first successful atomic bomb test China falls to Communist rebels under Mao
Zedong
1954 Eisenhower
articulates domino theory
1955 U.S.-backed Ngo
Dinh Diem ousts Bao Dai from power in South Vietnam
Key People
George F. Kennan - U.S.
State Department analyst who developed influential policy of containment in 1947
Harry S Truman - 33rd U.S.
president; adopted containment as a major part of U.S. foreign policy
Dwight D. Eisenhower - 34th U.S.
president; modified containment policy with more pessimistic domino theory
Ngo Dinh Diem -
U.S.–backed leader of South Vietnam; took power in fraudulent elections in 1955
Origins of the Cold
War
U.S. involvement in Vietnam occurred within
and because of the larger context of the Cold War between the
United States and the Soviet Union. Immediately after World War II, tensions
between the United States and USSR escalated, as Soviet forces occupied nearly
all of Eastern Europe and set up Communist governments there as a buffer
between the Soviet Union and the capitalist West. In 1946, British
prime minister Winston Churchill famously railed against the
USSR in his “iron curtain” speech, which lamented the sudden
wall of secrecy that had gone up between Eastern and Western Europe.
Containment
In 1947, U.S. State Department analyst George
F. Kennanargued that the USSR was not likely to make any rash moves and
that the United States could keep Communism from spreading simply by deterring
Soviet expansion at critical points, mostly in Europe, over the long term. This
policy ofcontainment became extraordinarily influential in the U.S.
government and became the basis of U.S. policy for much of the Cold War.
Escalation and
Paranoia
Three major events in 1948 and 1949 brought
the American fear of Communism to a fever pitch. First, the USSR, which
controlled East Germany, attempted to drive U.S., British, and French forces
out of West Berlin by cutting off all outside access to the city. The United
States responded to this blockade with the Berlin airlift over
the winter of 1948–1949, dropping
crucial supplies into West Berlin until the Soviet Union relented. Then, in
August 1949,
the USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb. Finally, in
October 1949,
after years of civil war, the Nationalist government of China fell
to the Communist forces of Mao Zedong. The combined force of these
three events plunged the United States into a deep paranoia and fear that
Communists would take over the world and might even be plotting secret
operations in the United States.
In this environment of alarm, national
security advisors of U.S. president Harry S Truman wrote an
influential memo called NSC-68 , which advocated a tremendous
increase in military spending to finance a massive military buildup, hoping to
deter Soviet aggression. Following the policy outlined by this document, the
United States became increasingly concerned with Communist expansion anywhere,
not just at the critical points that Kennan had identified. Combined with the
beginning of the Korean War in 1950, NSC-68 encouraged President Truman to
begin a rapid buildup of the U.S. military.
The Domino Theory
After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Truman’s
successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, gave a speech that would
soon become famous and important as an outline of U.S. Cold War policy. In the
speech, Eisenhower drew on Kennan’s previously articulated containment policy
but went a step further in describing what became known as the domino
theory. Eisenhower stated that the United States needed not only to contain
the USSR at critical locations but in all locations, for if
one nation became Communist, its neighbors were likely to turn Communist as
well, falling like a row of dominoes.
As a result of the domino theory, U.S. policy
makers began to see Vietnam as extremely important. If Vietnam became
Communist, domino-theory logic held that all of Indochina, and perhaps even all
of Southeast Asia, might become Communist. Well aware of the popularity of Ho
Chi Minh and his Viet Minh associates in both North and South Vietnam, U.S.
leaders feared that the free elections promised at the Geneva Conference, which
were scheduled to occur in 1956, would result in a unified, Communist
Vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem
Committed to the logic of the domino theory,
U.S. leaders sought to forestall the elections in Vietnam. The United States
thus threw its support behind the politician Ngo Dinh Diem, a
Vietnamese nationalist and Catholic who emphasized Confucian values of loyalty
and tradition and opposed the overthrow of old Vietnamese social structures—a
move that the revolutionary Vietnamese Communists advocated.
The Republic of
Vietnam
In 1955, with U.S. support, Diem rejected the
prospect of Vietnam-wide elections as specified by the Geneva Accords and
instead held a referendum limited to the southern half of the country. Using
fraud and intimidation, Diem won over 98percent of the vote, removed the feeble Bao Dai
from power, and proclaimed South Vietnam to be the Republic of Vietnam
(RVN). A CIA operative working in Saigon,Edward Lansdale, was
installed as an advisor to Diem. The United States then helped Diem organize
the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to control his new
state.
Assessing U.S.
Involvement
The United States’ involvement in Vietnam can
be understood only within the context of the larger Cold War against the Soviet
Union. After formulating the policy of containment and the domino theory in a
response to the USSR, the United States would become more and more involved in
checking Communism’s spread in Vietnam. Americans and others around the world
had watched as Britain and France appeased Adolf Hitler and the expansionist
Nazi Germany prior to World War II—an approach that had quickly brought
disaster. As a result, rather than appease the USSR, the United States vowed to
stop aggression before it happened. Whether or not this new tactic would work,
or was even appropriate, was not yet clear. Policy makers today claim to have
learned the “lessons of Vietnam,” but the American tragedy in Vietnam was
itself largely built on “lessons of World War II.”
SOURCE
http://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/vietnamwar/section3.rhtml
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