ABSTRACT
Nowhere did the concurrent phenomena of decolonization and the Cold War converge more fully than in Vietnam. The country’s thirty-year struggle for independence, marked by wars with France (1945-54) and the United States (1965-73), was the culmination of a longer quest for liberation from French colonial rule that began decades earlier. Vietnam’s anti-colonial leaders shared a common goal, but diff ered widely in how they aimed to achieve independence and how they envisioned post-colonial Vietnam. As they sought ideological inspiration and international support for their movements, what started as a debate between radicals and reformers in the 1910s morphed into a competition between communists and anti-communists by the 1950s. Spurned by American proponents of self-determination at Versailles in 1919, the revolutionary icon Ho Chi Minh turned to communists in China and the Soviet Union for support. His opponents, strongest in the southern part of the country, fi rst looked to Japan for anti-colonial solidarity, then attempted to negotiate gradual independence from France, and ultimately turned to the United States for help resisting a communist take-over.
