Mark Moyar

But it's one of the most important events of the 20th century.

And up until that time, you had the Truman administration, a lot of other people claiming that communism isn't really a big deal in Asia.

We shouldn't be too worried about it.

And for a while, a lot of people thought Mao was just this nice sort of nationalist who said he was going to be democratic.

Finally, when he takes over, suddenly reality sets in that these communists are actually pretty bad folks who are going to kill lots of people and try to take over the world.

And so you see then in 1950, the U.S.

starts aiding the French in Indochina, Vietnam, and then U.S.

also goes into Korea to fight the Korean War.

war and so a lot of people second guessing kind of forget about these underlying sources but i think it's you've got to fundamentally understand that there's a war against communism and this is an ideology that killed 100 million people in the 20th century which again

relevant today because you now have young people who don't really know the history saying, oh, socialism, communism are really not that big a deal.

But Vietnam clearly is aimed at preventing the spread of communism and particularly Chinese-led communism in Southeast Asia.

And so when the French War ends in 1954,

and the french just decide they're sick of this the united states decides it's going to help a new government in south vietnam as part of the effort to contain communism because what almost all the americans at this time thought was that this so-called domino theory meant that if you lose a place like south vietnam the other countries in the region are going to fall and that will be actually the guiding principle for for most of the war

Mm hmm.

Yes.

And, you know, initially, the United States was not very keen on this French effort because it was in Roosevelt and then Truman kind of thought European colonialism is kind of passe and we're not going to support it.

But then when they saw this communist threat, they agreed to help the French.

And the French also made promises to the Vietnamese that they could have

a greater degree of independence.

It's also interesting when you get to 1954 and the French are surrounded at Dien Bien Phu, they come to the Americans and say, can you bomb the communists who have surrounded us?