Events
1947
Containment doctrine begins to influence U.S. foreign
policy
1948
USSR blockades Berlin; United States responds with
Berlin airlift
1949
USSR conducts first successful atomic bomb test
China falls to Communist rebels under Mao Zedong
1954
Eisenhower articulates domino theory
1955
U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem ousts Bao Dai from power
in South Vietnam
Key People
-
George F. Kennan
U.S. State Department analyst who developed influential
policy of containment in 1947
-
Harry S Truman
33rd
U.S. president; adopted containment as a major part of U.S. foreign
policy
-
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th
U.S. president; modified containment policy with more pessimistic
domino theory
-
Ngo Dinh Diem
U.S.–backed
leader of South Vietnam; took power in fraudulent elections in 1955
-
Edward Lansdale
CIA operative stationed in Vietnam in 1954; eventually
became advisor to Diem
Origins of the Cold War
U.S. involvement in Vietnam occurred within and because
of the larger context of the Cold War between the United
States and the Soviet Union. Immediately after World War II, tensions between
the United States and USSR escalated, as Soviet forces occupied
nearly all of Eastern Europe and set up Communist governments there
as a buffer between the Soviet Union and the capitalist West. In 1946, British prime
minister Winston Churchill famously railed against
the USSR in his “iron curtain” speech, which lamented
the sudden wall of secrecy that had gone up between Eastern and
Western Europe.
Containment
In 1947,
U.S. State Department analyst George F. Kennan argued that
the USSR was not likely to make any rash moves and that the United
States could keep Communism from spreading simply by deterring Soviet
expansion at critical points, mostly in Europe, over the long term.
This policy of containment became extraordinarily influential
in the U.S. government and became the basis of U.S. policy for much
of the Cold War.
Escalation and Paranoia
Three major events in 1948 and 1949 brought
the American fear of Communism to a fever pitch. First, the USSR,
which controlled East Germany, attempted to drive U.S., British,
and French forces out of West Berlin by cutting off all outside
access to the city. The United States responded to this blockade
with the Berlin airlift over the winter of 1948–1949,
dropping crucial supplies into West Berlin until the Soviet Union
relented. Then, in August 1949,
the USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb.
Finally, in October 1949,
after years of civil war, the Nationalist government of China fell
to the Communist forces of Mao Zedong. The combined
force of these three events plunged the United States into a deep
paranoia and fear that Communists would take over the world and
might even be plotting secret operations in the United States.
NSC-68
In this environment of alarm, national security advisors
of U.S. president Harry S Truman wrote an influential
memo called NSC-68, which
advocated a tremendous increase in military spending to finance
a massive military buildup, hoping to deter Soviet aggression.
Following the policy outlined by this document, the United States became
increasingly concerned with Communist expansion anywhere, not just
at the critical points that Kennan had identified. Combined with
the beginning of the Korean War in 1950,
NSC-68 encouraged President
Truman to begin a rapid buildup of the U.S. military.
The Domino Theory
After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954,
Truman’s successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower,
gave a speech that would soon become famous and important as an
outline of U.S. Cold War policy. In the speech, Eisenhower
drew on Kennan’s previously articulated containment policy but went
a step further in describing what became known as the domino
theory. Eisenhower stated that the United States needed not
only to contain the USSR at critical locations but in all locations, for
if one nation became Communist, its neighbors were likely to turn
Communist as well, falling like a row of dominoes.
As a result of the domino theory, U.S. policy makers began
to see Vietnam as extremely important. If Vietnam became Communist, domino-theory
logic held that all of Indochina, and perhaps even all of Southeast
Asia, might become Communist. Well aware of the popularity of Ho
Chi Minh and his Viet Minh associates in both North and South Vietnam,
U.S. leaders feared that the free elections promised at the Geneva
Conference, which were scheduled to occur in 1956,
would result in a unified, Communist Vietnam.
