Roosevelt spoke passionately about his dislike for European colonialism and imperialism, often suggesting that American involvement in the war was partly the responsibility of the Europeans. This was further distorted by the balancing act of appeasing the European colonial powers, France and Great Britain, Roosevelt’s desire to aid development and future independence, and the shifting geopolitical map and spheres of influence that arose after Second World War.
It is these choices, driven as they were by political and cultural factors both inside and outside Vietnam itself, that show the repetition of flawed and mistaken strategy by the French and then the Americans, to understand the driving forces behind the Vietnamese experience in any way.
It’s a reminder to us that to decision makers of the past, the future was merely a set of possibilities’. Logevall does an excellent job in his historical analysis, not suggesting any one factor existing as the primary determinant of the eventual outcome in Vietnam, but rather surmising that the story is a product of ‘alternative political choices, major and minor, considered and taken, reconsidered and altered, in Paris and Saigon, in Washington and Beijing, and in the Vietminh’s headquarters in the jungles of Tonkin. American involvement, however, was to begin to ramp up and continue for the next 21 years.įredrik Logevall’s ‘Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam’, is a fascinating examination of the decades leading up to American escalation and direct troop involvement in 1965. It was on this day that French troops, under siege for two months by Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh forces, were roundly defeated, signaling the end of France’s efforts to re-exert control over its former Southeast Asian colony. Is a day that helped to alter the course of American history.
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