re: #202 Jay C

I recently read a book about the Truman Administration’s China policy, and your analysis is pretty much spot-on. Part of the problem (if not the main one) was that for most of the late ’40s, Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalists kept reassuring the US that everything was going just great, as Mao and the Communists kept capturing province after province and city after city. By the time it became obvious that the Kuomintang’s days as a mainland regime were numbered, it was too late for the US do much about it: so the “fall of China” came as something of a surprise to the American public. Which, coupled with the equal “surprise” of the Soviet atomic bomb test (1949) was quickly exploited by Red-baiting politicians to fan anti-communist hysteria for political gain. Which was no surprise at all…..

Unfortunately I think one of the poor results of all the red baiting and criticism is that the USA doubled-down to back France and then a very corrupt South Vietnamese regime when the chickens really started to come home to roost there. I think a serious and impartial study of the situation there would have made clear that Vietnam was going to combine under a single government, and that the best bet was that it was going to be that the Viet Minh was going to prevail.

(That the US fucked up in Southeast Asia due to geopolitical concerns should be no surprise. About on par with the fuck ups in the Middle East in the same time period. And the latter carried strategic resource concerns [oil]* with it as well as relations with what were very important European allies at the time.)

* - Finished Yergan’s _The Prize_ the other day. I have a better understanding now of how oil causes odd economic/political decision making, why the US policies in this regard are strange at time (US is both a major producer and a major consumer - so they act one way towards their import market while having to pay a lot of political attention to their domestic production side as well), and understand better what I lived through as a child/teenager in the 70s and early 80s (OPEC crises, high inflation, etc.)

Edit: en.wikipedia.org (book link - wikipedia)