For America itself this was conceived as a grand gesture of great moral significance, because America considered itself to be by nature anti-imperialistic due to its own supposed "birth"¹ in 1776 through rebellion against English imperialism.

Anti-imperialism even stood as the keynote of American foreign policy, at least since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson in the early 1900s.  Disregarding their own march across the North American continent – in which they swept aside the natural resistance of the Indian tribes and Mexicans already established in the American West in order to plant their own Anglo society there – and likewise disregarding the military power used to force a slave-holding South to remain in the Union minus its slaves, Americans had somehow come to believe that American society had achieved its greatness through simply its own superior moral qualities, its basic "goodness."  And thus America came to the conclusion that its mission in the world was to demonstrate its commitment to those same high moral qualities by insisting that its friends and allies take up the same "post-imperialist" character.  In other words, the rest of the world – or at least those in the "Free World," as Americans were beginning to term their particular sphere of global influence – must demonstrate the same generosity by abandoning their imperial positions in the rest of the world, just as America did in the Philippines.

As Americans saw things, its European friends were now – having failed to follow Wilson's call to do so after World War One – finally to pull back from their global positions outside of their own homelands in Europe.  The British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgians, etc. needed to go home, and leave to the oppressed peoples of the world their own right of "self-determination" (self-government).

It all sounded so moral, so noble.² But as with Wilson, it was played out without any understanding of how actual power (usually brute power) would then be required to fill the void of a departure of Western power from the East.  And thus what would eventually come to fill that power void would always surprise Americans, for it generally was not the proto-American democracy that Americans (at least the Humanists among the Americans) believed to be the inevitable outcome of such steps into national freedom – because supposedly self-disciplined democracy was a natural instinct of people everywhere.

Almost immediately those countries experiencing American-encouraged (or even American-enforced) independence would fall into violent civil war – finally brought to a close through the takeover of a local dictator of the most brutal variety, or it would get dragged into the bitter Soviet-American competition for cultural dominance in these newly freed societies – new battle zones in the on-going Cold War waged between these two superpowers.

Ironically, America would have great difficulty in understanding how its "pro-democracy/anti-imperialism" posturing would itself come across to others as highly imperialistic – not to mention highly disruptive of a people's cherished social order.   And worse, America would simply refuse to take a close look at the lessons about its own power programs that it should have learned along the way, continuing to walk into the same disasters generations later, still attempting the same failed Humanist Idealism in Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, not to mention in multitudes of cases to the south of its own country in Guatemala, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, etc.

Americans refused to understand that democracy is a social responsibility taken up by a society of individuals well-trained to assume those responsibilities personally, lest those responsibilities be taken on by autocratic or dictatorial personalities, "enforcers" of a social order that the people themselves were not able to bring into being – or maintain in the face of energetic human ambition.

Democracy is not "natural" to anyone.  The disciplines and responsibilities of democracy are either carefully taught to rising generations by those most directly involved in the social-moral indoctrination of children (namely their parents), or else authentic democracy simply does not take place.  It is not achieved by natural instinct as Humanists believe – believe religiously.  Humanism itself is in fact a very frightful religion, because socially, economically and politically it so easily becomes irresponsible – and dangerous to human life.

¹Many Americans consider the War of Independence of the 1770s and 1780s as the time of the nation's birth, not realizing that America had already experienced 150 years of very formative independent existence by that time.

²But moral self-congratulation has always been a blinding force in the lives of all-powerful people.

Unlike the Americans – releasing the Philippines to national independence – the Dutch at the war's end had no intentions of a similar sending off into independence of its extensive colonial holdings in Southeast Asia.  The business back and forth between the Dutch home-base in the Netherlands and its overseas territories in Southeast Asia was considered to be absolutely essential to the Dutch economy. Also, three hundred years of connection had made a cultural impact both ways between the Dutch and the Southeast Asian islanders.  Furthermore, during its long period there, the Dutch had succeeded in keeping a fairly tight control over political developments in the entire region.

But in the days when the end was clearly in sight for the Japanese Empire, the Japanese authorities – who for three and a half years had held the Dutch colony under tight control and who had destroyed much of the Dutch economic and social infrastructure – worked hard to make the return of the Dutch to their colony as difficult as possible.  They encouraged the Asians to rise up against the returning Dutch, supporting even in the days immediately after the war a proclamation of Indonesian independence by the local nationalist leader Sukarno and his close associate Mohammad Hatta.  Also, many of the weapons that the Japanese were forced to lay down in surrender went purposely to arm the Indonesian nationalists. The Dutch therefore found the return to their colony resisted heavily by a new group of anti-Dutch nationalists.

Indonesian resistance was chaotic, because of the vast cultural mix found on the islands (including even a large Chinese minority group). Ethnic massacres became frequent, with tens of thousands reported killed or missing in the first year of the resistance alone.  Several thousand Europeans were known specifically to have been tortured and executed and as many as 20,000 of mixed European-Asian ancestry were killed or went missing (probably suffering a similar fate, though most likely their bodies were thrown into the sea; some mass graves were later uncovered).  Also, some of the outer islands (which were Christian rather than Muslim as was much of the rest of the colony) were less than enthusiastic about the nationalist uprising.

In early 1946 the Dutch were back in business enough to send an army to Indonesia in an attempt to bring the region back under Dutch rule.^2b   And by 1947 the Dutch seemed to be succeeding in re-establishing Dutch authority over its colony, especially in the more populous areas of Sumatra and Java.

But the Dutch were having difficulty in defending their cause in the new United Nations, where Sukarno's Republicans seemed to find a hugely sympathetic ear. Australia, newly independent India, the Soviet Union – and even America – were tending to side with Sukarno and the Republicans.  The U.N. even pressed for negotiations between the Dutch and the Republicans, and ultimately a cease-fire line was established between the regions held by the Dutch and by the Republicans.

But the Dutch found that the Republicans were not really interested in respecting the cease-fire line, and given their growing diplomatic isolation the Dutch began to see their cause dying. Thus in late December of 1948 they made one last grand effort to put themselves back in power.  They regained much of urban Indonesia, but could make no progress in the countryside.  Furthermore, the members of the U.N. Security Council (including anti-imperialist America) were lining up strongly against the Dutch. America not only cut off all Marshall Plan aid originally designated for the rebuilding of Dutch Indonesia, but threatened to cut off all aid to the Netherlands itself.  Americans were very unhappy at the thought that their grants in aid, which equaled about half the budget allocated to the effort to restore Dutch rule in Indonesia, could be indirectly supporting Dutch imperialism.

With the world lining up against them, by the summer of 1949 the Dutch were ready to quit.  Discussions opened up in August and by November the Dutch had come to an agreement in support of Indonesian independence, under the man who would become Indonesia’s dictator, until another military leader, Suharto, forced him to step down in 1967 – in one of the 20th century’s most brutal takeovers. Suharto would then rule Indonesia for the next thirty-one years.  And thus it was with the Dutch gone, Indonesia stepped into "self-government."

^2bSince the wars end in August of 1945 the region had been under a rather feeble British administration, British Indian and Commonwealth troops having been sent to the islands largely to receive the surrender of the Japanese, not to defend Dutch interests!

Meanwhile things were getting very much out of hand in China.  At the end of the war in 1945 the elected government led by America's wartime ally, Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, was in a very shaky position. Chiang's public image in China had been badly tarnished during the war by the failures of his Nationalist (or Kuomintang) army to stop the Japanese from taking over the coastal cities of China (where his main support was originally concentrated) and by his having to rely on corrupt warlords and on foreigners (principally Americans) to maintain him in power in the Chinese rural interior to which he had to retreat during the war.

Meanwhile the Communist guerrilla leader Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) had built up a rapidly growing following: an army of Chinese peasants.  But Mao and his army largely sat out the war.  Mao had been virtually no help in getting the Japanese out of China, but was focused mostly on escaping the wrath of Chiang and his Nationalist army, which was heavily preoccupied with the Japanese.  Mao's hit and run operations against extended Japanese positions gained him respect in the eyes of his fellow Chinese, but strategically did little to dislodge the Japanese army occupying the country.  In sum, the Chinese took note of the fact that Mao had succeeded in not humiliating himself and his army with some embarrassing failure, whereas Chiang and his army (burdened with the greater war responsibility) appeared less than impressive as defenders of the dignity of China.

In the eyes of the average Chinese this was a highly shameful situation for any Chinese ruler to find himself in.  It registered with the Chinese much the same way the ancient idea of the Tianming (Mandate of Heaven) had once operated: such shame was the sure sign of the loss of that precious mandate deriving from the powers of Heaven (Tian).  This would be a very difficult assessment for President Chiang to overcome, and all the American China experts were well aware of this fact.

Economic factors also influenced the direction that China was to take after the war. Mao promised future land reform to the peasants, offering to seize the property rights of wealthy absentee landlords and hand land titles over to the peasants⁷ – making Mao very popular with the huge peasant population. Additionally, Chiang's inability to control inflation which skyrocketed after the war, destroying the savings of the urban middle class, undercut deeply the support of the one group that Chiang's Republic of China could usually count on.  Mao clearly was gaining political strength at the same rate that Chiang was losing his.

American diplomats (importantly Marshall) attempted at war's end to get the two Chinese factions to work together to rebuild China. But neither leader was willing to work with the other, their hatred for each other was so intense.

Meanwhile, although openly Stalin supported Chiang's Republic of China, he was less openly supporting Mao's peasant army by seeing that weapons surrendered by the Japanese in Manchuria (which had been granted at Yalta to Russia to administer after the war) came into the hands of Mao's army, and also let Mao and his army move into controlling position in Manchuria as well.

Truman countered by ordering the airlifting of thousands of Chiang's troops into eastern Manchuria (and sending U.S. troops there as well).  But beyond that, there really was little America could do, as American power was spread thin with its occupation of Japan and its support of Western Europe.  America could not resolve the problems of both Asia and Europe at the same time, and the situation in Europe appeared to be clearly more menacing to America than the situation in China.  Again, Truman and his advisors⁸ tended to look at the situation in politically Realist terms of the specifics of national interest (great in Europe but less so in China) rather than political Idealist or ideological (general anti-Communism) terms.  But that sophistication would not be easily understood by the American people, who more readily (often only) thought passionately in Idealistic or ideological terms.

By mid-1946 the enmity between Mao and Chiang finally erupted into a full-scale war.  Mao’s army tended to follow the program of passive resistance, slowly wearing down Chiang’s army in skirmishes fought in the countryside, at the same time that Mao’s army was expanding in size and territorial control.  With each small victory of Mao over Chiang’s troops, better weapons (including tanks) fell into the hands of Mao’s rapidly growing Communist army.

By 1948 the Communists were ready to take on Chiang’s positions in China's cities.  Over the course of 1948 one city after another fell to Mao’s troops.  In a two-month time period alone, between the beginning of December 1948 and the end of January 1949, numerous strategic cities in the north, including the all-important Beiping (Beijing), fell to Mao.  Then in April of 1949 Mao’s troops were able to cross the Yangtze River to attack and capture the Republic's capital at Nanjing.  Now Chiang’s troops were having to retreat south all the way to Canton.

On October 1st, Mao announced the establishment of the People's Republic of China, with its new capital at Beiping.  What was left of Chiang's army and political supporters – some two million of them – managed to escape the Chinese mainland and get themselves to the island of Taiwan.

And with that, a new Chinese status quo set in.  There would now be two Chinas, one with its capital at Beijing and one with its capital at Taipei on the island Taiwan. Which one would be entitled to the all-important China seat at the United Nations would become a point of major contention in the growing Cold War, as America would recognize only Chiang's government as the legitimate voice of China – and pressured its allies to do the same.

The Soviets demanded that China's U.N. seat go to Mao's government in Beijing, and demonstrated their irritation at American intransigence by proceeding to boycott sessions of the U.N. Security Council, hoping to force other U.N. members to formally recognize Mao's regime as the true government of China.  They would soon regret the decision to boycott those U.N. sessions.

⁷But then in 1958 Mao would take away that same ownership of the peasants’ lands when he forcibly "collectivized" China’s agricultural holdings with his "Great Leap Forward."

⁸Truman's small society of foreign policy advisors was outstanding: besides Marshall, Acheson, Lovett and Kennan, the list included Chip Bohlen, Averell Harriman, Paul Nitze, John McCloy and many other highly talented American statesmen.  Most of these men served as advisors in some capacity from the Roosevelt Administration all the way to the Johnson Administration in the mid-1960s.

At around the same time but at the other side of Asia, along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, the British were facing another set of responsibilities, ones also that Atlee's British government seemed to have little desire to carry.  The issue was Palestine – and who had the right/responsibility to govern it.

The region had long been a place of major contention, being sacred land to three different religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  It anciently was held by the Jews, until the Roman diaspora (scattering) of the Jews for their part in major uprisings against Rome in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D.  The city of Jerusalem had been not only the capital of the region but the political focal point of all who called themselves Jews, anciently as well as presently.  But the area was also the homeland of Jesus (the Christ) and as the Christian Holy Land, something of a spiritual center of Christianity.  And the Muslims also claimed the area, or more particularly Jerusalem, as the third most holy site in Islam

The area became distinctly Christian with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 313, but then was overrun by Arab Muslims in 637. Christian crusaders had briefly wrested it from the Muslims in 1099, but lost it again to the Muslims under Saladin in 1187.  Eventually Muslim Ottoman Turks took over the region, governing it over the following centuries as the province of Southern Syria.

The Turks lost big when they decided in 1914 to ally with the Germans in World War One.  The British stoked the nationalist feelings of the Arabs against the Turks, encouraging Arab national resistance with the promise of turning captured Turkish lands over to the Arabs for their own governance.  But in the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British had also promised the same lands to the European Jews (a Jewish homeland), in exchange for much-needed Jewish financial support⁹ for the British war effort.  And the British ultimately had interests of their own in the region.

In any case the British ultimately awarded the area to themselves in one of the follow-up treaties officially ending the war.  Palestine would become a mandate territory, under British supervision … while supposedly the land would prepare itself for eventual self-rule.

Palestinians, a mix of Muslim and Christian Arabs, began to be joined by European Jews who started to arrive in fair numbers after World War One as part of the Zionist Movement.  Jews had always had major difficulties avoiding persecution by European Christians ... and the thought of setting up an independent Jewish nation where Jews would no longer suffer such persecution had a strong appeal among the Jews.  This was especially true when the thinking turned in the direction of Palestine, the birthplace of Judaism.  And so a large number of Jews began arriving in Palestine in the years after the First World War.

This had upset greatly the Arab population living in Palestine.  Jews had always been part of the cultural mix, possessing their own quarter in the capital city Jerusalem.¹⁰  But the mass arrival of Jews began to upset greatly the long-standing communal relations among the various religious groups.  Particularly vexing was the problem of immigrant Jews buying from absentee Arab landowners (living off in the popular cities along the Mediterranean coast) farmlands in the Palestinian interior, which had whole communities of Christian and Muslim farmers living on them.  Being thrown off the land to make way for Jewish kibbutzim (communal farms) stirred the Palestinians to such wrath that the British had been called on in 1936 to put down a major Arab revolt.  This revolt dragged on brutally for several more years, with thousands of Arabs killed (and hundreds of Jews as well).

One of the results of the revolt was the organizing of the Jewish immigration effort by David Ben-Gurion's Jewish Agency, and the development of a well-disciplined Jewish army, the Haganah, which would serve with the British in keeping order in Palestine (to the advantage of the Jews, of course).

But relations between the British and Jews would be somewhat tenuous, as the British were also very sensitive about upsetting the larger Arab world, with which the British had strong political and economic interests in common.  Consequently in 1939 the British published a White Paper announcing a limit on Jewish immigration into Palestine of 15,000 individuals per year.  The Jews were upset.  But the Arabs were still hardly delighted by even this number of Europeans coming in on their land.  There really was no undeveloped land for the Jews to settle on.  The Jews would thus have to displace Palestinians in order to occupy the land.

Now the British found themselves up against Jewish efforts to enter Palestine illegally in massive numbers, as Hitler tightened the noose around the Jewish population in Germany (and soon in the rest of German-occupied Europe).  The British navy attempted to hold off shiploads of Jews trying to enter Palestine, sinking many of the boats in the process.

But this problem, as big as it was, was nothing by comparison to what exploded at the end of World War Two in 1945.  The Allies were shocked by the sight of the multitudes of concentration camps scattered across central and eastern Europe, the dead and the walking dead they encountered.  A good half of the inmates were Jews, sickly survivors of Hitler's efforts to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.  To make a very bad situation even worse, it quickly became apparent that non-Jewish people across central and eastern Europe, people who themselves had suffered greatly from the Germans, had little interest in seeing the Jews return to their homes.  And with the shortage of jobs, housing, even food – and the growing ranks of DPs (Displaced Persons) – Zionism became very appealing to the Jewish survivors in Europe.  As the inmates of the concentration camps were judged sufficiently recovered to leave the camps, thousands of them would find boat passage to bring themselves to Palestine.

But the British were still trying to control the flow of European Jews into Arab Palestine.  As a result, Jewish organizations began to take on the British Palestinian Authority.  The Haganah took up the fight against British troops and installations, and Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang) and Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, took up the function of terrorists, brutally murdering British authorities and Arab civilian leaders (the Muslim and Christian Arab Palestinians had no military organization or officers of their own) in order to drive Arabs off the land and the British out of the country.¹¹

Fed up with the thankless role of trying to mediate between the Jews and the Palestinians, the British Labour Party at this point (February 1947) announced that it was turning the matter over to the United Nations to resolve, and that July voted to terminate its Palestinian Mandate – effective no later than August 1948 (and earlier if possible).

The United Nations established a committee to come up with a plan to partition Palestine geographically, ultimately proposing a Jewish state – mostly along the heavily urbanized and more fertile Mediterranean coast – and an Arab state – in the southern Gaza desert region and the quite arid mountainous interior.  It also proposed that Jerusalem city, located within the territory of the Arab state, would be internationalized under U.N. authority.

The proposal, backed by both America and the Soviets, was satisfactory to the Jews.  The Arabs, both in Palestine and in the surrounding Arab lands, however were totally opposed to handing over any Arab land to a new Jewish state. Further, they claimed that the United Nations had no authority to decide for the Palestinians their own future, as that right belonged only to the Palestinians themselves.

Some of the committee members (India, Iran, Yugoslavia) proposed an alternate single federal state, and Australia ultimately abstained in the decision.  In late November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved the plan (thirty-three to thirteen with ten abstentions).

Britain let it be known that while it accepted the plan, Britain would not be the one responsible for instituting or enforcing it.  In any case Britain at this point issued 14 May 1948 as its departure date.

Meanwhile the surrounding Arab states announced their full opposition to the plan, even by military action if need be.  And Begin's Irgun organization announced that it would not accept partition because the entire area, including Jerusalem, belonged to the Jewish nation alone.  The dark clouds of war thus gathered.

Indeed, fighting broke out immediately with the announcement of the U.N. partition plan.  Arabs tended to attack Jews in the cities, and Irgun, Lehi and the Haganah (especially Irgun) attacked Arab villages in the countryside.  But Irgun was also busy in the cities bombing civilians' neighborhoods at will, to terrorize the Arabs into submission or flight.  The most infamous was the Deir Yassin massacre by Irgun and Lehi, in which they moved house to house killing as they went, leveling the houses also.  Rumors were also that they even shot Arab prisoners, women and children as well as men.  True or not, these rumors helped enormously to put the Palestinian population into panicked flight.  Soon floods of Arab refugees were abandoning their homes, shops and farms in an attempt to reach neighboring Arab nations, especially the new state of Transjordan, just east across the Jordan River. Also the city of Jaffa (which had been designated as belonging to the new Arab state) was attacked by Irgun and the Haganah with such intensity that its Arab population of 70,000 was reduced to a mere 4,000 when the fighting ceased.

The formal withdrawal of the British in May of 1948 and the announcement by Israel's leader Ben-Gurion of the existence of the new state of Israel did not change matters much,¹² for the fighting never let up.  The partition plan of the U.N. was greatly ignored by the new Israel, which sent the Haganah into internationalized Jerusalem to lay claim to as much of the city as possible, plus ordered it to extend land boundaries as deep as possible into land designated for the Arab state.  Furthermore, the Haganah was instructed to move as much of the Arab population out of the new Jewish zone as possible.

Surrounding Arab nations answered the Israeli challenge with small military contributions, none of them coordinated in action nor large enough to do any real damage to the Israeli Defense Force (the former Haganah).  Only in Jerusalem, where retired British officers commanded Jordanian Arab troops, was there effective resistance to Israeli expansion, enough that the Israelis were able to hold only the Western half of the city.  Like Berlin, Jerusalem too would be a divided city, for a long time.

Ultimately some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who had fled their homes and who were not able to reach or settle in neighboring Arab countries were forced to settle in U.N.-run refugee camps, as the Israelis would not let them return to their homes.  And here they stayed in tents, fed by U.N. food trucks, living on barren and unproductive land, far from any possibilities of employment, and destined to settle there indefinitely.  A U.N. resolution called on Israel to allow the Arab Muslim-Christian refugees to return to their homes. But that went completely ignored by the new Jewish state.

Thus a problem had taken root that would simply never seem to go away, one that would produce more than one future war and more diplomatic confusion than any other issue because the issue has always been insolvable ... despite repeated – but always failed – attempts by one American President after another to intervene to get both sides to see "reason."

⁹That support was expected from Europe's extremely wealthy Jewish Rothschild banking family, to whom the Balfour Declaration was in fact directed.

¹⁰The Muslims also had a quarter, and Christians possessed the two remaining quarters in Jerusalem.

¹¹It is interesting to note that the Irgun leader Menachem Begin, who ordered the destruction of the King David Hotel (and 91 lives, including even Jews as well as British and Arabs) would become Israeli Prime Minister in 1977... and ironically become winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.  Also a former Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir would follow Begin as Israeli Prime Minister in 1983, a man who ordered the assassination in 1944 of the British Minister for Middle East Affairs, Lord Moyne, and in 1948 the United Nations peace negotiator, Swedish Count Bernadotte.

¹²However, both America and Soviet Russia were quick to recognize the new Israeli government.

Unlike the British, and quite like the Dutch, the French coming out of World War Two had no intentions of giving up their colonial holdings in Asia.  But the effort to reestablish their position there would encounter major difficulties.  The Vichy French government had been something of an ally to the Japanese during the war and had stood aside to let the Japanese occupy their colonies in Indochina (the three Vietnamese coastal regions of Tonkin in the north, Annam in the center, and Cochinchina in the south, plus Laos and Cambodia).  With the end of the war and with both the Japanese and Vichy French routed, the new French Republic was eager to regain its French holdings in Indochina.

However, at this point President Roosevelt made it quite clear to the French that they were not to try to restore their colonial position in Indochina.  Besides America's professed opposition to colonialism or imperialism, America had been working closely with the Viet Minh, an anti-Japanese resistance group made up of Communists and Vietnamese nationalists led by the Communist Ho Chi Minh.  This group now was calling for national independence (from the French) ... and American policy initially was to support this endeavor.

In September of 1945 Ho Chi Minh announced the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but was blocked by British and French troops arriving to receive the Japanese surrender ... and to restore French control over the colony. But here too, the defeated Japanese meanwhile had been turning many of their weapons over to the Viet Minh.  Consequently, fighting immediately broke out between the newly armed Viet Minh and the French and France's Vietnamese ally, the young Emperor Bao Dai – whose reputation among the Vietnamese was tarnished however because he had served as something of a Japanese puppet during the war.

For the next few years fighting between the two sides remained mostly concentrated in Tonkin in the Vietnamese North and small in scale – except for one incident in 1946 in which heavy fighting broke out in Haiphong, the French bombarding the port city and killing 6,000 civilians, and driving the Viet Minh into the countryside.  However, French troops, subsequently sent out to finish off the Viet Minh, found them hard to trap – and a cat and mouse game developed between the two sides.

In 1949 the French created a State of Vietnam under the Emperor Bao Dai, an Associated State within the French Union, and under French supervision.  And a Vietnamese National Army was set up by the French to patrol the less troubled regions.  Also Laos and Cambodia were announced as similar Associated States within the French Union.

But with the victory of Mao's Communists in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, the situation in Indochina took on a new quality.  Communist China began to send military assistance to the Viet Minh.  And America finally began doing the same with the French.  The matter had now become part of the larger Cold War.