AM64
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I think he was in line with FDR's long term vision of liberating all of these European colonies around the globe. I just found out this morning after doing some more reading that the OSS even provided support for him when he was fighting the Vichy French. Once FDR was out of the way, Ho Chi Minh became expendable or useless. The Truman administration was not eager to be breaking up these colonial empires and ignored Ho Chi Minh's calls for assistance against France.
I think things would have turned out a bit differently with regards to some of these former colonies. You likely wouldn't have seen the emergence of the Dulles Brothers and their merging of the CIA and State Department assets to engage in coups, counterinsurgencies and the creation of the Military Industrial Complex.
And once the French left, why did we stick around during this time in the mid-1950s? He already had over a decade of presence over there already by then.
I don't know how old you are or your background. I grew up in the 50s and early 60s, and my dad was career AF - fighter/interceptor pilot with WW2 experience. That in many ways made me very sensitive to Soviet intentions; it carried over into adult life, and most people of those generations were extremely concerned about communist takeovers around the globe. Cuba made it real to many. The OSS did some good work - maybe great - hard to tell for sure. There's probably a good argument that moving from that to the CIA, career politicians and "diplomats", and limited crises rather than world war changed our intelligence community into something far less competent and with nebulous goals (the Dulles brothers specifically). In our own bungling way we tried to counter Soviet moves into a lot of places, but we were not as slick as they were, and we were too closely aligned with the past colonialist masters that the Soviets and Chinese blamed for local shiffholes being were what they were - sometimes even legitimately. Honestly though with pre and post history to consider, it's hard to believe that huge swaths of Africa and some places in this hemisphere would have been better without colonialism.