WI the OSS gave their full support to Ho and the US helped Vietnam achieve their independence after WWII?
Ho Chi Minh and the OSS
- Thread starter NoOneFamous
- Start date
Basically people actually give more of a crap regarding the 14 Points and colonized peoples, which is ASB...
Pangur
Donor
Ho Chi Minh turned to the USSR when he could not get support from the US. Provide that support and kiss good bye to him turning Communst.
deathscompanion1
Banned
I've always doubted that. Same for Castro given those he associated with. Ho Chi Ming definitely leaned socialist and would probably have given communist dictatorship a try once the stupid Americans gave him free reign to screw with their allies and clients.
In 1920 Ho Chi Minh became a founding member of the *French* Communist Party at the Tours Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tours_Congress Now perhaps he would not have done so had the US backed Vietnamese nationalist aspirations at Versailles. (Though the influence of his friend Marcel Cachin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Cachin might still lead him to the PCF.) But we are talking about post-World War II here, not 1919. Ho has had more than two decades as a Communist behind him, and while he will of course welcome US support, it is way too late to make a non-Communist of him.
We may be able to reign in the Communist beliefs with beliefs in democracy - Nelson Mandela had similar socialist personal beliefs, but was willing to put them aside to focus on greater political reform and integrating South Africa into the global economy.
So with US-support, we may see Ho Chi Minh as a staunch Republican, if a tad pinkish.
So with US-support, we may see Ho Chi Minh as a staunch Republican, if a tad pinkish.
Guys, you seem to assume ideological commitments are destined to trump practical statecraft. That's not how the world works, and a cursory reading of Cold War history will dispel any suggestion otherwise. Despite its socialism, Yugoslavia functioned as a perfectly reliable Western partner for a near half-century. Hell, if Mao Tse-tung, of all people, was capable of a pivot to the Americans, there's no reason Uncle Ho couldn't pull it off.
Quite. A Communist Vietnam need not be pro-Soviet; especially if the Communists still win the Chinese Civil War. Just like the OTL Sino-Soviet split, Vietnam will want a protector against China; if Mao as OTL initially aligns with Stalin, Ho will likely be much more willing to be US-aligned.
The bigger problem is creating conditions where the US being willing to side with the Vietminh against the French. Possibly a scenario where less crazy French leaders allow the Ho-Sainteny agreement to stand, rather than immediately rejecting it? Although I can still see the French and Vietnamese coming to blows.
With regard to the Tito parallels, one should remember that it was Stalin who broke with Tito, not the other way around. https://books.google.com/books?id=TfX_AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA9 Whether Ho breaks with Stalin and Stalin's ally Mao--and yes, they were genuine allies at the time, despite some differnces--probably depends more on what Stalin and Mao do than on what the US does. It is possible that they will fear Ho is trying to take too hegemonic a role in southeast Asian communism. It is even conceivable that Ho would turn to the US in such an event, though IMO he is more likely to try to play off the USSR against the PRC. But whether Ho turns to the US probably will not depend on the *prior* US attitude toward him. After all--even if one views Tito as the initiator of the split in 1948--US policy toward Tito was anything but friendly at the time.
Perhaps have FDR live longer, that might help. FDR could see the nationalist thought behind Ho's ambition and look over the Communist part, that only helped them secure weapons from China and the USSR, which they could now get from the US. Ho mistrusted the USSR and China just as much as the French and Americans. Ho might even drop a lot of Communist thoughts as he proceeds. Only a faction that would agree to supply weapons but not send in troops he will trust, enough. If the US can do that they can turn the stuff around.
But, the US can not support Vietnamese nationalism against their French Allies openly. Even if they were not Communist. Not without looking like hypocrites towards Europe and the USSR. They wil loose grip fast.
They need to really be ready to oust the French fully if they want Ho to accept their help. Total, undeniable independence without foreign presence, thats what Ho wanted. Getting the French to back down that early would be nearly impossible. The Chinese back away, but the French won't. The US can't try to talk the Frnech into leaving, that will create a huge power vacuum that the Vietminh just can't fill. Ho won't accept foreign troops on their land. The Vietminh were only a minor power right after WWII, without any actual territory so what will the US be actually supporting? What will take the place of the French after they magically leave and the Vietminh move their stuff down South? Not even half the population would accept Communist/Socialist rule like that, especially not the Buddhists and Catholics on land and i doubt they leave.
No, the French need to stay for a while longer and the Vietminh need to fight them or they have no chance of taking power in Vietnam. So the US needs to first openly support the French while secretly support the Vietminh. I think then it can work.
The issue with this setup is that a viable French state, no matter how impetuous, is always going to prove a more attractive proposition to U.S. policymakers, especially with the onset of the Cold War, which rendered the task of maintaining some visage of a united European front a very pertinent one. The Viet Minh could be kicking ass and scoring weekly Dien Bien Phus against French forces - in the eyes of the OSS, it really doesn't matter, because, at the end of the day, Ho's just the leader of a bunch of zipperheads running around a jungle (and commie zipperheads, in that).
The earlier the PoD, the better. I've toyed with the idea of killing Charles de Gaulle sometime before the Fall of France, decapitating the French exile movement before it's even got off the ground. With Anglo-American efforts to organize a provisional government in disarray, anti-Nazi resistance in la Métropole assumes an increasingly radical, pro-Soviet character, dominated by veterans of the Spanish Foreign Legions. Post-liberation, with an Iron Curtain quite clearly on the horizon, the Allies install a military administration in Paris, hoping to hand power over to a clutch of ex-generals and conservative public officials once the worst of the insurgency has been mopped up. Under such extraordinary conditions, planners in Washington are likely to view Ho Chi Minh and his guerrillas in an infinitely more favorable light than the French did IOTL - not only have they served with tenacity and determination against Japan, they also constitute the closest thing to a civil society in Indochina, colonial overlordship having been reduced to a dim memory. The prospects of a negotiated settlement, in which the U.S. recognizes Ho's government in return for generous basing rights (and, likely, guarantees of a slight shift away from out-and-out Stalinist ideology, towards something more reminiscent of Castro's Cuba), are reasonably good.
Of course, that's the best case scenario. I'm actually more interested in the darker one, in which the U.S. government, increasingly rattled by the appearance of communist governments across the Eurasian continent, shun the Viet Minh in favor of a Ngo Dinh Diem figure, promptly installed as President of Indochina under the auspices of a joint Anglo-French-American 'assistance force' (they might even call back Bảo Đại and the Japanese puppet kings, figuring the specter of southeast Asian nationalism just isn't worth tempering now it's there). The result is a Yankee-led counterinsurgency in Vietnam decades before IOTL's, on an inevitably far bloodier scale.
Pangur
Donor
Nice idea however China has a land border with Vietnam so the US navy are of limited use. Crazy idea, have the US be the ones to evict the Japanese from Vietnam might give you the grounds to keep the French returning which seems to be the sticking point
TinyTartar
Banned
Clandestine support through the OSS is not an option because it would be done against our far more important French Allies.
Now, coming to a diplomatic solution to the issue at hand, and making sure that Ho, despite any socialistic leanings, is not planning on becoming a Soviet satellite let alone ally, and is not planning on exporting his beliefs beyond his borders, might make working with him possible.
A reclusive but hardcore Communist nation that hates the Politburo is fine. An internationalist pinkish or socialist nation with ties to the Politburo and Red Army is not okay at all. This is why Yugoslavia was fine to work with on certain things and Cuba was not.
Now, coming to a diplomatic solution to the issue at hand, and making sure that Ho, despite any socialistic leanings, is not planning on becoming a Soviet satellite let alone ally, and is not planning on exporting his beliefs beyond his borders, might make working with him possible.
A reclusive but hardcore Communist nation that hates the Politburo is fine. An internationalist pinkish or socialist nation with ties to the Politburo and Red Army is not okay at all. This is why Yugoslavia was fine to work with on certain things and Cuba was not.
This is a myth. Ho was a Communist long before WW II. He spent several years in the 1930s in Moscow, working for the Comintern.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
It's a not very interesting ATL, but maybe just if an free-wheeling member of the Joint Chiefs had Truman's ear and advocated something like this: Ho Chi Minh is a communist, or a socialist, pretty much because the only people writing books on how to liberate a new nation from colonial powers are communists and socialists. But let's give the guy credit for having some snap. Probably like all of us, at least most of the time, he takes from the books what he wants and leaves the rest.
Mr. President, the real challenge is helping the French find a way to save face. We don't need to see a NATO nation involved in a war in Asia.
Mr. President, the real challenge is helping the French find a way to save face. We don't need to see a NATO nation involved in a war in Asia.
Mandela was in a very different position. To begin with, he was not a Communist, and his issue, his overwhelming issue, was ending white supremacy in South Africa. Communists and socialists were his most commited allies on this issue, but even in South Africa, some business interests were opposed to apartheid.
Then when the transition happened, it was a deal, not a conquest. Mandela came out of prison thanks to moral pressure, not at the head of a conquering army. Mandela came in with constraints, including no mandate whatever to seize property, and ongoing white control of the army and security services and judiciary.
This last was going to change but not all at once.
Most importantly, by 1991, when Mandela came to power, Communism was discredited. The USSR was failing. Capitalism was riding high.
As noted elsewhere, Ho had been a Communist since 1920, and spent many years in Moscow working for Stalin's Comintern.
I would also note that the first act of Ho's government in 1954 was to decree the execution of 2% of the population (about 200,000 people) as class enemies. This was a literal quota. Millions of people had fled to the south in 1954, including priests and other Catholics, landowners, former employees of the colonial government, and so on. So there weren't a lot of "class enemies" left in the north. Local party cadres reported that they had liquidated those remaining, but didn't meet the quota. They were ordered to find more victims. This led to victims being chosen at random, and to people denouncing neighbors to settle grudges or divert the fickle finger of death. The campaign was called off after 120,000 people were killed.
This was not the act of a Jeffersonian democrat or a pinkish Republican.
Funny enough, When Ho was working as a Communist agent, he sold one of the most famous Vietnamese nationalist Phan Bội Châu to the French. Who was in a favor of creating Vietnamese republic based on the ideals of Sun Yat-sen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Bội_Châu