Many people wonder how the Americans managed to become involved in a war 10,000 miles away from their native continent, but the initial reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam seemed logical and compelling to American leaders. Following its success in World War II, the United States faced the future with confidence. From George Washington’s perspective, the threat to U.S. security and world peace was communism emanating from the Soviet Union. Any communist anywhere, at home or abroad was, by definition, an enemy of the United States. With the unsuccessful appeasement of fascist dictators before World War II, the Truman administration believed that the United States and its allies must meet any sign of communist aggression quickly and forcefully. This was known as containment. In Vietnam the target of containment was Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh front he had created in 1941. Ho Chi Minh was a communist with long-standing connections to the Soviet Union. He was also a Vietnamese nationalist who fought first to rid their country of the Japanese and then, after 1945, to stop France from establishing its former leadership of Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Truman and other American leaders, having no sympathy for colonialism, favoured Vietnamese independence. But expanding communist control of Eastern Europe and the triumph of the communists in China made France’s war against Ho Chi Minh seem anticommunist. When France agreed to an independent Vietnam under Bao Dai as an alternative to Ho’s …show more content…
The outbreak of war in Korea in 1950 served primarily to confirm Washington’s belief that communist aggression posed a great danger to Asia. Truman having “lost” China and settling for a stalemate in Korea caused succeeding presidents to fear the domestic political consequences if they “lost” Vietnam. This apprehension locked America into a firm anticommunist stand in