Why America Betrayed France in Its Fight Against Communism

A Review of Background to Betrayal

Welcome back, and thank you for reading! Today’s article is the third installment of my long-term focus on specific instances of American involvement in the colonial world during the Cold War, with the first being on why the CIA destroyed Rhodesia and the second on how it destroyed the Congo. To discuss this topic—American policy toward French Indochina—I used the recently republished book Background to Betrayal by Hilaire du Berrier. If you find this article valuable, it would be hugely helpful if you could like it by tapping the heart at the top of the page to like the article; that’s how the Substack algorithm knows to promote it. Thanks again!

I recently reread Sir Max Hastings’s work on Vietnam, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. As I read that classic mainstream history of the war, two passages struck me that I had missed years ago when I first muddled my way through the lengthy work.

In one, a son of a landlord named Nguyen Hai Dinh describes the hellish life he experienced when he decided to remain in North Vietnam as the French left, and describing his decision to stay, said, “We had thought the French were colonial oppressors until the communists took over; then we started to think of the French as our friends.” Why would he see the French as his betrayed allies rather than the communists under whom he chose to live? Because, as Sir Hastings puts it, “All those possessed of property or education became marked for exclusion, even death, under the new order.”

In the other passage, Sir Hastings describes the plight of South Vietnam’s middle-class landlords—those who were most clearly the enemies of the communists, for the reason described in passage one—and how America pressured Diem to destroy them rather than ally with them to fight communism. He said, “As late as 1960, about 75 percent of all the South’s farmland was owned by 15 percent of the population, almost all absentees because terror made them so . . . When the CIA’s William Colby pressed Diem for a radical redistribution of farmland, the president replied, ‘You don’t understand. I cannot eliminate my middle class.’”

To those with only a passing understanding of the conflict, both comments are odd. If the Vietnamese viewed the French as their allies against communism, why did we not do more to help the French remain and fight communism—wouldn’t continued French rule have been better than American involvement? Similarly, if the communists hated Vietnamese landowners as much as they hated the French, why would we not side with the landowners and use them as a core constituency in the supposed crusade against communism?

The truth of the matter is a combination of things.

As to the matter of landlords, that gets into the American obsession with egalitarianism.¹ Much like in Rhodesia one short decade later,² “we” hated the idea of social stratification much more than “we” hated communism.³ So, siding with the property owners was an unbroachable solution to winning the war.

The matter of why we didn’t properly side with the French and support their war effort when it still could have been won is more complicated. We had liberated them during World War II, after all…unlike our support for socialist parties in Italy, it wasn’t necessarily that we disliked the French, even if de Gaulle was somewhat tiresome. But a dominant viewpoint amongst American elites at the time was that colonialism had to go, and siding with communists—whether directly as in Rhodesia⁴ or indirectly as happened elsewhere—was preferable to strong support for a colonial project.

As a result, America found itself involved in an intractable and bloody war in Indochina after the French left because we had preferred to see them lose and their colonial project end than to see the communists defeated.

Such is what Hilaire du Berrier shows in Background to Betrayal. Below, I’ll tell the story du Berrier tells in the book, and then give a brief review of it. Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] Why America Betrayed France in Its Fight Against Communism

The Indochinese Quagmire and Our Support for Communism

If there is one central message of du Berrier’s Background to Betrayal, it is this: “American liberals, however, were more ardent in fighting colonialism than they ever were in the war against Communism.” Yes, we did eventually fight the communists. Yes, we did aid the French somewhat—grudgingly and in amounts too small to matter much—but our involvement was never enough to save the French colonial project, nor was it meant to be.

Rather, American policy since World War II had been to replace Axis rule and colonial governments with ostensibly nationalist regimes, with whether those regimes were actually communist or not being something of a non-issue. Hence why, as du Berrier shows, much of the material the Viet Minh later used to terrorize the French and chase them out of the country was sourced from America, and they were taught to use it by OSS agents. America’s rulers always wanted those “nationalist” forces to win, and the communist-filled OSS⁵ supplying the communist rebels during World War II was a means by which we did it.

In fact, communist-friendly FDR⁶ admitted during the war itself that he aimed to wipe away the colonial empires in the aftermath of the war,⁷ and took policies toward achieving as much before he died.⁸ Such is what General Eisenhower—the president during France’s agonizing Indochinese conflict—spoke of and complained about in his memoir, noting the particular preoccupation FDR had with ending French colonial rule. As du Berrier notes:

It was no secret that international forces described as "liberal" had worked ceaselessly toward the destruction of France's empire since the early years of World War II. A significant paragraph in General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe deals with President Roosevelt's trip to Egypt prior to the invasion of Europe.

Ike complained that the president showed no interest in the problems confronting Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe, his mind being entirely occupied with plans for France's colonies and his determination that they should not return to their prewar status. There were no few men around the president, from State Department's information section to his closest advisors, to feed constantly that determination and to advance to key positions Americans who would further such a policy. Whether the policy favored the advancement of Communism by chance or was designed to that end is something no congressional committee is ever likely to make clear.

Thus came America’s first, halting steps toward an Indochinese policy: we would work, during the Second World War, to eradicate French influence out of a misplaced sense of reverse White Man’s Burden. We saw it as our duty to free the noble savages from the ruthless Europeans, and in doing so to set them on the path to pleasant prosperity.

Ignored in that bizarre inversion of reality were a few key matters. For one, it was Europe that dragged most of its colonies out of the Stone Age.⁹ Indochina was more civilized than the Congo, of course, but it was still the French who brought them beneficial trappings of modern life, from just and impartial courts to global trade networks and capital inflows.¹⁰ Destroying all that to put communist-friendly nationalists in charge would hardly lead to a Rousseau-esque world. But it would aid our Soviet “friends,” which quite concerned the Soviet-friendly FDR administration.

So, those anti-colonial prejudices and the outlandish, liberal beliefs behind them created our first Indochinese policy, which was as pro-communist as one might expect from an administration that referred to Stalin the butcher as “Uncle Joe.” As du Berrier notes:

Our first Indochina policy was only a general one existing in the minds of a few well-placed men. It lasted from 1940 to the end of World War Il and aimed at the elimination of French influence.

There was no opposition to it, for the policy was never openly declared. It was the period of great friendship with Russia and an almost childish dream of a Jean Jacques Rousseau postwar world wherein, by simply driving out the colonialists, the little people of Africa and Asia would revert to "their original, good, and peaceful states."

That anti-colonial attitude didn’t end with FDR’s death. Many of the Red-allied members of his administration went on to hold influential posts in the future,¹¹ and they worked with other anti-colonial types to ensure American foreign policy remained much more anti-colonial than anti-communist.

In fact, the second stage in our Indochinese policy was as nonsensical and pro-communist as the first. From the end of the Second World War to the early 1950s, the same time as Marshall handed China to the communists¹² and the White Rajahs of Sarawak were being deposed, our policy in Indochina consisted of aiding Ho Chi Minh in his overthrow of the French.

Truman’s team operated on the same assumptions and principles as FDR’s, if somewhat less openly, and so was perfectly happy working to destroy the French colonies in Indochina in the name of nationalist, liberal democracy.

As du Berrier notes, this period “was a continuation and natural development of the first and marked the period of our active support of Ho chi Minh.” Critically, we refused to work with the French, including the brave members of the French colonial presence who had waged guerrilla war against the Japanese.

Instead, as du Berrier tells it, we sided with the man who had been “educated in Moscow's Orient University, had been sent to China in 1925 with Borodin, the agent charged with the communization of China,” and was later “head of the bureau of the third international, which was entrusted with the preparation of Communist revolutions in Southeast Asia.”

Instituting such a policy involved not only blacklisting the French who had put their lives at risk to help us, but purging anti-communist Americans from the ranks if they didn’t support our policy of supporting the avowed communist in his attempts to eradicate colonialism in Indochina. In du Berrier’s words:

After V-J Day French resistance groups whose members had risked their lives to aid Americans and rescue downed pilots in Indochina . . . were pushed aside with a hasty sowing of freedom medals, and overnight American political and military support was thrown behind Ho chi Minh.

Any American who warned against the possible results of such a policy, or who expressed forebodings based on long Far East experience and knowledge of the personalities we were using and supporting, was ruthlessly dropped if in American employ and blacklisted if he were not, on charges that he was "working against America."

Eventually, though “Disillusionment with Ho chi Minh was never openly admitted,” America backed off from open support of the anti-colonial communist movement. Critically, this was not because of any ideological shift amongst members of the elite, but because they found themselves embroiled in Korea¹³ and saw tentatively supporting the French as a way of relieving pressure on UN forces in Vietnam.¹⁴

Still, even as we supported the French in some ways and General MacArthur framed the war as a fight against communism, the State Department remained resolutely anti-colonial rather than anti-communist.

Thus, the French were not supported much, and found what aid they received ineffective in defeating the communist menace because our State Department officials continued playing down anti-communist rhetoric when working with the Vietnamese, encouraging continued mass resistance to the French attempts to re-establish rule:

But our officials made no pretense of pointing out the Communist menace to the young Vietnamese intellectuals they had told to refuse all cooperation with the French until given complete and immediate independence. MacArthur fought Communism, but colonialism was the enemy our State Department was fighting. A firm, centralized French command was necessary to the prosecution of the war, but we merely went through the motions of supporting it.

Notably, that continued American involvement in anti-colonial causes on the ground in Indochina could occur even as national policy and objectives changed because the personnel were never changed. The anti-communists had been purged as part of the push for Ho and never brought back into the fold. The anti-colonial types remained, and were kept involved:

It must also be remembered that the Americans who had been thrown out of government service for opposing policy number two, and whom time had proved right, were never taken off the blacklist.

They were never given another government job. But the men who had supported Ho chi Minh and ousted every loyal American counseling against it, remained where they were.

Thus there were absurd situations like, as we presented the French as an ally against communism, American personnel even helped attack the French out of anti-colonial sentiment. An OSS-connected individual was even accused of helping provide the explosives for a deadly theater bombing in 1952, and was brought back into the country after the French were ousted.¹⁵

Critically, this was the first war in which NGO-type organizations were involved in pushing what they presented as American policy, but was in reality pro-communist, anti-colonial policy. One such group was the International Rescue Committee, which aided not just Mau Mau rebels known for torturing British civilians in Kenya to death, but also communist activity all over the globe.¹⁶ Joseph Buttinger, a member of the socialist underground during the run-up to WWII and a key leader in the IRC, got the NGO involved with the CIA¹⁷ and, through it, pushed anti-colonial rhetoric meant to justify forcing the French out.

Thus, even as the American government pretended to be backing the French, its agents—whether official State Department men on the ground or covert agents acting through NGOs and the media—pushed pro-communist, anti-French actions and rhetoric because of an anti-colonial worldview.

Eventually, the French lost. The defeat at Dien Bien Phu was acclaimed in the media as a crushing loss, and the peace conference led to their expulsion from North Vietnam, which became a communist state ruled by the man American agents and policy had done so much to support.

But, as part of that peace treaty, the French were allowed to keep some troops in South Vietnam to ensure European civilians were protected and the Viet Cong were hunted down. America reacted violently to that, refusing to even meet the French in their request that, if they left, we’d protect the lives and private property of French citizens from the Diem regime. Instead of acceding to that reasonable request, we launched a violent and short-sighted media blitz against the French to get them to end the colonial project and quit the country for good:

the reasons for the radio and press violence against the French, and attempts to blame them for the crisis which destroyed part of Saigon, were becoming clear. The treaty of independence accorded France the right to maintain troops in South Vietnam as protection for the European population and to protect the country against the Vietminh. Diem and the Americans around him wanted those troops out. No one considered for a moment that a time might come when Americans would wish with all their hearts to have European help back there again.

The French eventually bowed to our demands and left, and we took up the mantle of dealing with the Vietnamese. Unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of American troops who were to later have to fight and bleed in Vietnam, the same problems of ideology-influenced policy that led to the French withdrawal remained.

Namely, we were unable to contemplate the idea of hierarchy and rule that wasn’t nominally mass democratic. Diem was a tyrant, and an incompetent one at that, but pretended to be elected and so we vociferously supported him while it was convenient, much as was later the case with Mugabe.¹⁸ But the other powers, whether the French or the Vietnamese emperor, were clearly undemocratic in how they would rule, and so they were scorned, as were effective anti-communists.

For example, the team behind the growing American presence in Vietnam refused to even translate and read French works on their experience in administering Indochina and fighting communist rebels in it, viewing those works through anti-colonial lenses and thus seeing them as unconscionable.¹⁹ The French were regarded as bitter ex-colonists and so were ignored, much to our detriment.

Similarly, the chief of police in Saigon was an effective anti-communist.²⁰ He was thrown out for being too harsh in his anti-communist measures as we supported a man—President Diem—who had weakened support for the French as they fought the communists because “the people” were involved with the communists, and then later ran vast prison camps himself.²¹

That is infuriating and nonsensical, but was just the tip of the iceberg.

Another example comes from the attempts of the Vietnamese Emperor, Bao Dai, to rule in place of the communists. He could have filled the role reasonably well, and been kept as a tradition-oriented figurehead much as Gen. MacArthur kept the Emperor of Japan around as a way of resisting the anti-tradition communist menace. Instead, he was discarded by an America “more determined to rid the world of monarchs than to use constitutional monarchy as an ideal against Communist totalitarianism.”

Deposing the emperor, an act with which the communists quite agreed, led to predictable consequences: Vietnam learned that tradition was out the door and instability not only to be expected but the primary pathway up the now-wide open social ladder, and so coup followed coup as various factions struggled to seize for themselves what had once been the purview of the emperor:

The process of destroying Bao Dai, which Ho chi Minh had started, America finished with David Schoenbrun for a spokesman. With respect for emperor destroyed, respect for parents, law, tradition and everything that made for stability began to crack . . .With hereditary rule discredited each Vietnamese saw no reason why the man at the faucet should not be himself.

That was the situation out of which grinding American involvement in the jungles, swamps, and mountains of Vietnam was born. The French could have remained in Indochina, had we not supported the communists for ideologically anti-colonial reasons. The emperor could have ruled as a stabilizing figurehead, had we not deposed him in the name of a vague sense of equality and social egalitarianism. But we—or rather the State Department and CIA apparatchiks—acted on the basis of a liberal ideology, and so thousands of Americans died in a conflict that need not have happened, and the communists we had done so much to support won in the end. Oops.

Background to Betrayal as a Book

There is much good and some bad about Background to Betrayal, but on the whole, it is good.

Particularly, it is good in that it unapologetically tells the other side of a story that the propagandists would very much like to avoid: the Vietnam War was unnecessary, and not just because the Tonkin Gulf incidents were made up. Had our government been run by sane men, we could have avoided fighting there by simply not aiding the communists in their fight against France. But, like in Rhodesia a decade later, that proved too much to ask.

Further, it is good in that it is a fun and easy read. Portions are tedious, as I’ll describe below, but on the whole, it is an interesting book with a compelling narrative that draws one in. The stories are told well, the chapters broken up effectively, and the language readable, on the whole. Paired with the unapologetically pro-colonial, anti-communist message, that makes it a refreshing read and quite unlike most written about the conflict.

There are problems with it, however. For one, it would have been better split into two books. The first portion of the book—which covers why America betrayed France on behalf of the communists—is superb and a story in and of itself. The second part—which covers the insanity of America’s resolute support for Diem despite his many foibles and the better options we initially had—is a different book that would have been better kept separate. The first portion is more interesting, more compelling of a read, and would have read better on its own.

The other problem is that Background to Betrayal suffers from the same fault as many of the other books in the One Dozen Candles set²² (with the exception of the quite different and even better Rhodesia Accuses): at times, the author’s desire to make a point about a grand conspiracy in support of communism—a point that necessarily connects a great many people, organizations, and events—turns the book tedious. Entire blocks of pages full of names connected to this or that, detailed diatribes on minor points of the incident, and the like are unfortunately included in this book and detract from it. Du Berrier would have done better to use footnotes or endnotes to show such minutiae. Instead, it is thrown in as walls of text, and a compelling narrative is broken up by blocks of tedious and unnecessary detail that must either be painfully waded through or skipped over entirely, at the risk of missing something important.

Fortunately, that problem is relatively minor. Only a few instances of it come to mind, and they were no more than half a page. But, still, trimming them down would have quite added to the book at points.

Overall, Background to Betrayal is a very good read. Despite the couple of small organizational and editing flaws noted above, it is a good read and one that is quite important. As du Berrier notes at the end of the book, “Only an informed public, such as America did not have on November 3, 1964, will bring the victory at the polls which alone will eradicate the virus and prevent many more Indo-Chinas to come. All of the force of America's massed left, from the White House down, was regimented to silence those who would tell America the truth.”

That is quite true. Avoiding these disasters requires an educated population, specifically, one that is educated in where we went wrong in the past. Reading this book will help one understand why our Cold War policy was such a mess, and what sorts of policies we’ll need to take in the future to avoid similar disasters.

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1. What the term means, discussed here:

2. The egalitarian aspect of our betrayal of Rhodesia discussed here:

3. More details on this in the context of Rhodesia:

4.

5. Covered somewhat here: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300155723-009/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOoq8mQh31jZBID_wHNtiVWA5q9_rCW8owlk6ZGDKoFSDrUy0hGI3

6. The heavy communist presence in FDR’s New Dealer administrations is covered well by Whitaker Chambers in Witness

Also noted here: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/reds-in-the-white-house/

7. https://risingtidefoundation.net/2025/04/12/fdrs-anti-colonial-vision-for-the-post-war-world-as-he-saw-it-revisited/

8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2145412

9.

10. Covered in this book:

11. https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/stalins-secret-agents-held-high-posts-in-cold-war-u-s/

12. One of the few interesting parts of liberal historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin’s The Cold War's Killing Fields is where he describes how Marshall forced Chiang into pointless peace talks, then yanking aid, all while refusing to aid Chiang as he fought against Mao and Soviets in Manchuria. Marshall remained implacably opposed to Chiang because he was trying to defeat the communists rather than let them into the government (pg 78). Eventually, with US aid gone and the Soviets aiding Mao, China fell to communism, the "political changes" Marshall wanted. This was much like the sort of betrayal and backstabbing via peace conference later seen in Rhodesia's fight against communism

13. Sir Max Hastings’s The Korean War is far better than his book on Vietnam

14. As du Berrier notes: The Ho camp in America simply folded its tents like the Arabs and silently stole away to another camping ground when the North Koreans started rolling southward. Overnight Indochina became a second front, potentially capable of tying down Communist Chinese forces that might otherwise be deployed against United Nations troops in Korea. A feverishly active third period of American policy was ushered in. Military, diplomatic, and economic missions were rushed to the embattled French, who were being pressed by the enemy America had armed in 1945 and supported ever since.

15. As du Berrier notes: an American named McKay connected with the OSS was credited with furnishing explosives for a theater bombing in 1952 and was expelled from the country by the French. The CIA was said to be behind his return to Vietnam after Diem's rise to power.

16. Du Berrier provides:

Sometime in 1951, while the British were struggling to suppress the Mau Mau terrorists of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya, whose bloody orgies and revolting oath-taking are described by Robert Ruark in his book Tharu, a Kikuyu named Mungai Njoroge arrived in New York. An unnamed pen pal in Rye, New York, had contacted Njoroge concerning a scholarship. The International Rescue Committee saw that the Kikuyu got through Stanford University Medical School and in 1958 sent him home with supplies and operating funds equaling $30,000 per year, plus a promise of $100,000 to build a hospital and set up village clinics.

The Mau Maus were badly mauled and were in dire need of doctors at the time Njoroge was brought to America. The possibility definitely exists that correspondence between a pen pal in Rye, New York, and a member of the tribe perpetrating the horrible atrocities in Kenya, was not accidental. And a deep suspicion that the IRC's education of "Dr. Mungai Njoroge" was part of a wider plan might seem "lunatic fringe" if the private anti-colonialist war of the IRC did not somehow, invariably, come to light in every area of the world where America's allies were faced with revolts.

The "refugees" for whom Angier Biddle Duke and Joseph Buttinger begged donations and American visas could be bona fide refugees from Communism; or they could be murderers being sought by the French in Algeria, the Portuguese in Angola, or our allies faced with a Communist-backed rebellion anywhere in the world.

In 1965 Noroge was the pro-Red defense minister of Kenya.

17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Buttinger

18.

19. As du Berrier tells it: How astute it was of the American team, whether motivated by devotion to liberalism or working purely and simply for money, to take the precaution of discrediting in advance as an embittered colonialist every French writer and statesman who might have proved embarrassing. Jean Larteguy, author of The Centurions, and some half dozen books on South Vietnam, could have taught us much, but the language barrier and the campaign of Diem defense through francophobia discouraged anyone who might have published his writings.

20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%AA_V%C4%83n_Vi%E1%BB%85n

21. As du Berrier notes: The fact that the "ex-pirates" we boasted of ousting from the control of the Saigon police had really beaten the Communists, we ignored as blissfully as we did another unpleasant fact: When the French were fighting Ho chi Minh, Diem's pleas that we should not help them because, though they were fighting the Communists, they were also fighting the people.

22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Dozen_Candles