The purpose of this essay is to discuss the cause of the Vietnam War. It will explain the relationship between the Cold War and American involvement in Southeast Asia. It will discuss whether such intervention was consistent with the Atlantic Charter promise of self-determination. It will consider how the United States explained its growing involvement in Vietnam, and whether and how that explanation changed in the course of AmericaÆs 20 years of direct involvement in Vietnam.
Much of Southeast Asia had been a French colony before the Second World War. The French had introduced French law, customs, and Roman Catholicism into Vietnam; these cultural cross-fertilizations can still be observed among Vietnamese immigrants in the United States. The Japanese had driven the French out during their conquest of Indochina, and Ho Chi Minh had fought a guerrilla war against them as an ally of the Western Allies.
After the war, Ho Chi Minh had wanted independence, but the USA allowed the French to return to their former colony. Ho Chi Minh began a guerrilla war against them as well. In 1954 the USA assumed the responsibility from France for protecting Vietnam south of the partition line drawn that year between Communist and ôfreeö territory. The American part would become known as South Vietnam, with its capital in Saigon. Ho Chi MinhÆs Communist government was centered in Hanoi, in what would be called North Vietnam.
The United States government has always insisted that it was invited into South Vietnam by a legitimate, free, democratic government that needed help in defending itself against aggression by North Vietnam. Both U.S. and foreign critics have argued that the South Vietnamese government was never a genuine, viable, or democratic government. Instead, they claim, it was a puppet government set up by the U.S. and the French in order to give the United States an acceptable reason for its invasion of an Asian cou...