Indochina
South-east Asian zone of French colonialism and the Vietnam War
Also known as: Indochina, Vietnam
South-east Asian zone of French colonialism and the Vietnam War — the principal Cold War quagmire of the 1960s in T&H (T&H 193).
Quigley's Framing
Indochina enters T&H through two channels: as the eastern terminus of the French colonial empire from the 1860s and as the principal Cold War battleground after 1954. Quigley treats the French phase as a textbook case of colonial overreach — a small European power attempting to hold a culturally distinct East Asian territory of 30+ million people without the population or industrial base to sustain the effort. The 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu is read as the inevitable terminus.
Strategic Role
The American assumption of the French role after 1954 is one of T&H's set pieces. Quigley is sharply critical of the domino theory framing of Vietnam as the test case of Free World resolve, and he reads the steady escalation from advisors under Eisenhower and Kennedy through the full ground commitment under Johnson as the most costly self-inflicted strategic failure of the American Cold War. The mismatch between American conventional military doctrine and Vietnamese revolutionary warfare is treated as the operational core of the failure.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 193 Quigley
Indochina was the eastern terminus of the French colonial empire and the principal Cold War battleground after 1954.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1245 Quigley
The American escalation in Vietnam was the most costly self-inflicted strategic failure of the American Cold War.