The French in Vietnam

The story of Western failure of culture, ideology, and military strategy in Vietnam in the 20th century is most immediately associated with the American debacle in that country in the circumstances of U.S. withdrawal and the aftermath in the mid-1970s. But a Western prelude to the American failure occurred, some 20 years earlier, when in 1954 the French colonial forces and government apparatus were decisively forced out of what had for decades been known as French Indochina, in the aftermath of a battle between the French and the communist-dominated nationalist forces known as the Vietminh, at a northern township called Dien Bien Phu.

The prelude to Dien Bien Phu began, from one point of view, in the aftermath of World War II, when the defeated Japanese forces that had occupied Vietnam during the war were obliged to withdraw from the territory. Meanwhile, the Potsdam Declaration, comprising Allied views of the postwar world, more or less guaranteed the repatriation of Allied colonies, including France's Indochin

. . .
g communist (Schutz and Kirkendall 497). By the time of the Kennedy administration, too, however, the Viet Cong, indigenous Vietnamese ideologically aligned with the Vietminh in the south, had engaged in the project of guerrilla insurgency against Diem and his corrupt government apparatus. Thomson, Stanley, and Perry (112-113) take the view that America's policy to extend itself outward in this way sowed the seeds of its own eventual decline in prestige in Asia, symbolized chiefly (though not solely) by its own failure in Vietnam. An overview of Vietnamese history in the 20th century, the French legacy to America and what America did with it are important features of the "back story" of what caused the French failure at Dien Bien Phu and the question of whether that failure could have been prevented. That is because elements that fostered defeat of France and those that fostered the shaping of Vietnam's identity, though distinct, overlap and converge in a variety of ways. The first overlap can be discerned in the nascent anti-imperialism that emerged globally in the 20th century, particularly after World War I, and the residue of commitment on the part of imperialist and colonialist powers to hang on to their antique and exotic ge
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Bien Phu, Vietnam Indochina, Cold War, Bo Dai, Stanley Perry, French Allied, World War, Free French, Chi Minh, II Dine, dien bien, dien bien phu, bien phu, world war, world war ii, war ii, schutz kirkendall, cold war, 1954 french, communist ideology, french failure, bo dai, european studies 28, encyclopedia 1975 ed, laos cambodia vietnam,
Approximate Word count = 2185
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

More Essays on The French in Vietnam