The Triangular Route to Vietnam: The United States, Great Britain, and Southeast Asia, 1945–1950

Abstract

on 1 may 1950, the president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, allocated $10 million in military aid for the French-sponsored governments of Indochina, and approved cin principle' a programme of economic assistance to them. The amount of money involved was paltry in light of the billions the United States had given to western Europe under the Marshall Plan, and no one at the time believed the president's decision to be darkly portentous. In retrospect, however, this decision may well be considered what the authors of the Pentagon Papers called 'a tangible first step' towards deeper American involvement in Vietnam.1 Why did the Truman administration take this step? Robert Blum, who addresses this issue directly in his recent book, argues that the administration's commitment to contain perceived Communist expansionism, reinforced by the conservative 'China Lobby,' was extended to cover Southeast Asia when China came under Communist control in 1949. Other writers, concerned with the larger issue of United States military intervention in Vietnam, have addressed the question tangentially. Frances Fitzgerald suggests that American ethnocentrism caused a generation of policymakers to misunderstand the nature of the Vietnamese conflict and to make judgements that were tragically inappropriate ; this was intervention through cultural ignorance. A neo-Marxist analysis by Gabriel Kolko stresses United States interest in maintaining access to Far Eastern raw materials. Studies by Michael Schaller and William Borden demonstrate that US concern for Japanese economic recovery led policymakers to seek trading partners for Japan in Southeast Asia, and required that the United States protect these markets against Communist subversion or invasion. It might be easiest to say, with two other recent