The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [167]
The settlement at Geneva ended a war and averted wider participation by either China or the United States, but lacking satisfied sponsors anxious to sustain it, and including dissatisfied parties looking to reverse it, it was born defective. Not the least of the dissatisfied was the United States.
Geneva represented defeat for Dulles in all aspects of his Indochina policy. He had failed to prevent establishment of a Communist regime in North Vietnam, failed to gain Britain or anyone else for united action, failed to keep France actively in the field, failed to gain approval for American military intervention from the President, even failed to gain EDC, which the French Assembly unkindly rejected in August. These results left little impression; he was not prepared to infer from them any reason to re-examine policy. As in the case of Philip II, “no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.” He called a press conference in Geneva not to “mourn the past,” as he said, but to “seize the future opportunity to prevent the loss of Northern Vietnam from leading to the extension of Communism throughout Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.” The refrain was the same as before. He adduced one lesson, however, from the experience: “that resistance to Communism needs popular support … and that the people should feel that they are defending their own national institutions.” That was indeed the lesson and it could not have been better stated, but as events were to show, it had only been stated, not learned.
3. Creating the Client: 1954–60
At this stage, with eight years of American effort in aid of the French having come to nothing, and with the French effort having failed at a cost in French Union troops of 50,000 killed and 100,000 wounded, the United States might have seen indications for disengagement from Indochina’s affairs. The example of futility in China was fresh, where a longer and greater effort to direct that country’s destinies had been dissipated by the Communist Revolution like sand before the wind. No inference from the Chinese experience—that Western wishes might not apply to the situation, that foreign politics, too, is the art of the possible—had been derived. The American government reacted not to the Chinese upheaval or to Vietnamese nationalism per se, but to intimidation by the rabid right at home and to the public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected. The social and psychological sources of that dread are not our subject, but in them lie the roots of American policy in Vietnam.
The United States had no thought either of disengaging from Indochina or of acquiescing in the Geneva settlement. Dulles’ immediate task as he saw it was two-fold: to create a non-colonial Southeast Asia treaty organization like NATO which should provide authority in advance for collective defense—or its image—against the advance of Communism in the area; and secondly, to ensure the functioning of a valid national state in South Vietnam able to hold the line against the North and eventually recapture the country. The Secretary of State was already engaged in both efforts in advance of the Geneva Declaration.
Dulles had begun drum-beating for a SEA mutual security pact in May as part of his campaign to counteract Geneva. Whether consciously or not, he was moving to bring the United States into position as the controlling power in the situation, replacing the colonial powers. He wanted a legal international basis for intervention as had existed in Korea because of violation of a boundary established by the UN. The implications alarmed observers, among others the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which asked in a series of editorials before the Geneva cease-fire whether Dulles’ purpose was “to provide a backdoor method by which the United States can intervene in the Indochina war.” Do the people of the United States wish “to organize the use of armed forces against internal revolt of the kind that started