US Involvement in Vietnam

U .S . INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM

The Vietnam War was the longest and most expensive war in U .S . history Since the Second World War throughout the Cold War , United States policymakers tried to apply the lessons they had learned in Europe to the foreign policy problems of Asia . As a result , United States foreign policy in Asia was often incoherent and American intervention in Asian affairs often ended in tragedy . In this paper we would try to outline the origins and consequences of U .S . involvement in Southeast Asia

Let us look

at the history of United States involvement in Vietnam First of all , in order to understand the Vietnam War , we need to recognize that the French conquered Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia in the 1870s . From the 1870s to the 1940s , the French ruled and exploited the wealth , resources , and labor of Vietnam and Indochina . In 1940 , France fell the Nazi Germany , and France itself became a colony . After France fell , Japan conquered French Indochina and tried to replace French colonial rule with Japanese colonial rule . The Vietnamese soon took up arms against the Japanese .In fact , between 1941 and 1945 , the United States worked closely with the Vietnamese resistance forces led by Ho Chi Minh . After World War II , Ho Chi Minh , who had been our close ally asked the United States to force France to give up its imperial control of Vietnam and Indochina . President Truman decided to side with the French . He accused the Vietnamese independence leaders of being communists

There was no fixed beginning for the U .S . war in Vietnam . The United States entered that war incrementally , in a series of steps between 1950 and 1965 . From 1945 to 1954 , the United States bankrolled the French efforts to retake Vietnam and Indochina as French colonies , spending over 2 billion dollars (Lewis . After World War II , France was do destroyed and bankrupt that it could not support a prolonged war with the Vietnamese . In 1950 , President Harry S . Truman authorized a modest program of economic and military aid to the French , who were fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony , including Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam . When the Vietnamese Nationalist and Communist-led Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954 , the French were compelled to accede to the creation of a Communist Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non-Communist entity south of that line . The United States refused to accept the arrangement

In the southern half of Vietnam , the U .S . had been applying its influence . A Christian Vietnamese named Ngo Dien Diem had been in the United States between 1950 and 1954 . There he had met Senator John F Kennedy , and he had become the hope of some as an alternative to communism in Vietnam . The Eisenhower administration began giving Diem financial support , and in 1954 Bao Dai , king in Saigon was ousted from power and replaced by Diem . In 1956 The United States prevents free...