French Indochina experienced the bitterest struggle for independence in Southeast Asia. With financial backing from the United States, France tried to reimpose imperial rule there after the Communist and nationalist guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) declared an independent republic in 1945. French forces were decisively defeated in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu. At the subsequent international peace conference, French Indochina gained independence. Laos and Cambodia became separate states, and Vietnam was temporarily divided into separately governed northern and southern regions pending elections to select a single unified government within two years. The South Vietnamese government refused to hold the elections, and civil war between it and the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or North Vietnam, broke out.

Cold War fears and U.S. commitment to the ideology of containment drove the United States to get involved in Vietnam. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (elected in 1952) refused to sign the Geneva Accords that temporarily divided the country, and provided military aid to help the south resist North Vietnam. Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, increased the number of American “military advisers.” In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded America’s role in the Vietnam conflict, declaring, “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”9 (See “Viewpoints 31.2: Ho Chi Minh, Lyndon Johnson, and the Vietnam War.”)

The American strategy was to “escalate” the war sufficiently to break the will of the North Vietnamese and their southern allies without resorting to “overkill,” which might risk war with the entire Communist bloc. South Vietnam received massive military aid. Large numbers of American forces joined in combat. The United States bombed North Vietnam with ever-greater intensity. But there was no invasion of North Vietnam or naval blockade of its ports.

Most Americans initially saw the war as part of a legitimate defense against communism, but the combined effect of watching the results of the violent conflict on the nightly television news and experiencing the widening dragnet of a military draft spurred a growing antiwar movement on U.S. college campuses. In 1965 student protesters joined forces with old-line socialists, New Left intellectuals, and pacifists in antiwar demonstrations in fifty American cities. By 1967 a growing number of critics had denounced the American presence in Vietnam as an intrusion into a complex and distant civil war. The north’s Tet Offensive in January 1968, a major attack on South Vietnamese cities, failed militarily but shook Americans’ confidence in their government’s ability to manage the conflict. Within months President Johnson announced he would not stand for re-election, and he called for negotiations with North Vietnam.

Elected in 1968, President Richard Nixon sought to disengage America gradually from Vietnam. He intensified the continuous bombardment of the enemy while simultaneously pursuing peace talks with the North Vietnamese. He also began a slow process of withdrawal from Vietnam in a process called “Vietnamization,” which transferred the burden of the war to the South Vietnamese army. He cut American forces there from 550,000 to 24,000 in four years. Nixon finally reached a peace agreement with North Vietnam in 1973 that allowed the remaining American forces to complete their withdrawal in 1975.

Despite tremendous military effort in the Vietnam War by the United States, the Communists proved victorious in 1975 and created a unified Marxist nation. After more than thirty-five years of battle, the Vietnamese Communists unified their country in 1975 and engaged in the process of nation building that had been delayed by decades of war against colonial rule and the U.S. effort to force a political and economic model on the country as part of its doctrine of containment of communism. Millions of Vietnamese civilians faced reprisals for aligning with the United States, including Hmong and Degar peoples (such as the Mnong) and other ethnic minorities. They first fled to refugee camps elsewhere in Southeast Asia and later settled as refugees in the United States. (See “Individuals in Society: Sieng, a Mnong Refugee in an American High School.”)