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HISTORY OF UNITED STATES INVOLVEMPST IN VIETNAM 39 fuse with Communism, Again, Vietnam stood in contrast to the non-French colonial areas of Southeast Asia. For unlike the Amer- icans and British who had the wisdom to grant independence to their colonies, and unlike the less powerful Dutch whom the United States refused to support after 1949, the French remained intransigent. With increasing American support, they continued to resist Vietnamese claims for independence to the very last— down to their military defeat at Dienbienphu in 1954. This un- yielding French policy gave Vietnamese nationalists of all political orientations, pro-Communist and non-Communist, no effective al- ternative but to work together against the French. Thus in Vict- nam, in marked contrast to the other countries of Southeast Asia, the mainstream of the nationalist movement came under the dom- ination of a largely Communist leadership; and all Vietnamese recognized Ho Chi Minh’s Communist-led Vietminh as the force that successfully opposed French power and eventually secured Vietnamese independence. Although Franklin Roosevelt had made clear his opposition to any reoccupation of Vietnam by France and had advocated mak- ing it a United Nations trusteeship territory, the Truman admin- istration—while hoping France would ultimately grant Vietnam independence—undertook to back French efforts to re-establish control, To avoid antagonizing France, which it was hoped could be made the keystone of an American-sponsored European mili- tary alliance, the United States temporized in Vietnam with respect to its general commitment to self-determination. Our support to France increased until we were underwriting two-thirds of the costs of her military effort, with well over a billion dollars allocated in the year 1953 alone. By granting this support, the United States took its first long step toward making the Vietnamese cyrical about American protestations of support for national self-deter- Tuination. France’s military defeat culminated in mid-1954 with Dien- bienphu, setting the stage for the Geneva Conference of that year. An understanding of the political failure that accompanied this Military defeat is most important to any analysis of the present Situation. In 1950 the French had established a Vietnamese regime under Bao Dai. Never given political autonomy, let alone inde- a. a