Ngo Dinh Vietnam Case Study

With the end of World War II in 1945, the United States restricted its international involvement to military presence in the Pacific and post-war Japan. Domestically, the US entered a period of relative isolationism. The American people, many of whom had lost family members during the war, had no desire to focus on the rebuilding of Europe and instead honed in on the post-war life of a victorious nation. However, a new concern loomed with the threatened spread of communism, and the US ended its isolationist fantasy to engage in a new policy of containment. Meanwhile the Soviet Union was determined to take its place as a principal military and nuclear power, proving through the late 1940s and into the 1950s that it would be undeterred in taking

The French were defeated in 1954 following the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and accepted a temporary partition of Vietnam at the 7th parallel at the Geneva peace conference. Minh retained leadership of the North while US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem became prime minister of South Vietnam. US President Eisenhower recognized the increasing seriousness of the South Vietnamese situation, effectively left with little protection against the North communist Viet Cong. He helped establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) whose mission was to prevent the spread of communism among southeast Asian nations. Eisenhower also warned the US of a possible domino effect if a nation such as Vietnam was lost to communism. At a press conference on April 7, 1954, he presented his explanation of Vietnam's importance, first highlighting its vital economic resources and the need to protect its citizens from undesirable dictatorship. He also cautioned that if Vietnam was threatened, then the rest of Southeast Asia and even Japan would also be threatened and would fall, one after the other, like dominos. Eisenhower was the first US president to send troops and military advisors to South Vietnam, and his domino theory set the course of US policy and involvement in Vietnam. Eisenhower's successors relied on it to

Even though the actual facts of the incident were never verified, it became the means by which Congress authorized Johnson to wage war. The following spring, US combat troops were sent to South Vietnam after the Viet Cong attacked a US Air Force base. Johnson felt that he had to support the war he inherited from his predecessors and therefore also felt compelled to squash the anti-war movement. He was concerned that any anti-war resistance would communicate to the rest of the world that he did not have the support of the American government or the American people. Consequently he ordered the CIA to spy on domestic anti-war activists and also encouraged the FBI to use its counter-intelligence program against the peace movement. In effect, he had two war fronts – the one in the jungles of Vietnam and the one in the streets and on college campuses in the US. Just as British troops never adjusted to the tactics of the American colonists' revolutionary army, American troops struggled with the Viet Cong's knowledge of local topography and use of guerrilla