President Woodrow Wilson ignores petition by Ho Chi Minh for help in creating Vietnam....

[steve2470]

Wilson ignores petition by Ho Chi Minh for help in creating Vietnam independent from French rule and led by nationalist government.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_the_United_States_in_the_Vietnam_War

and

D. R. Sar Desai, Vietnam: The Struggle for National Identity (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), p. 50


Interesting tidbit I found.

[steve2470]

1. comments ? nt

[LanternWaste]

2. My understanding is that Minh was not looking for an independence movement

My understanding is that Minh was not (yet) looking for an independence from French rule, but merely additional rights for indigenous people (speech, local representative voting, assembly, some trade laws, etc). He sent a delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference who were initially met only by a junior level staffer from the American State Dept who became sympathetic and successfully petitioned a meeting with Wilson, George and Clemenceau (who it is said, feel asleep during the delegations' entreats).

But, as the Conference was hardly a rousing success anyway (except to Paris and London in the short term), and Wilson being outmaneuvered by his allies during his push for the 14 Points Plan, it unsurprising that a small territory, lacking in necessary war resources (or so was thought at the time) was overlooked as irrelevant, ignored as inconsequential and discarded as trivial.

To me, the most striking (and far reaching) political manipulations came via Clemenceau and George who struck up the Sikes-Picot Accord between the two that set the groundwork for the state of Middle East in the here and now.

[1939]

4. I read a detailed history of the Versailles Treaty process

Besides Wilson getting rolled by the Brits and French, there were over a hundred representatives from a wide array of ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups in Paris trying to get independence, autonomy, or recognitions of rights. Is it any wonder that any particular one of them got short shrift from the major delegates?

[True Blue Door]

3. Well, yeah. You don't just willy-nilly stick your nose into the internal politics

of a powerful ally on behalf of some obscure local separatist movement.

A President who did that would have to be taking up the cause of so many different local movements, against so many powerful states, that it would practically be their full-time job and they would come to be ignored as irrelevant and trifling.

Woodrow Wilson didn't see into the future to know that that particular case would lead to something bad for the United States. Nobody's writing books about the time such-and-such separatist group from Paraguay or Namibia or wherever failed to persuade Ike or Gerald Ford to intercede on their behalf, because nothing came of it one way or another.

[hifiguy]

5. Harry Truman ignored Ho as well

Ho, principally a nationalist but one with Communist leanings, thought the a anti-imperialist Truman would assist the Vietnamese in throwing off the French colonial yoke. Power politics of the post WW II era made it impossible. Bad move.

[LeftInTX]

6. I never knew they crossed paths

[malthaussen]

7. Wilson's fault for that "self-determination" noise.

In the interest of breaking up the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Allies endorsed the policy of self-determination for indiginous peoples, which made a lot of naive suckers actually think they'd live up to their rhetoric in their own empires. Or perhaps that's too harsh, maybe the "naive suckers" weren't naive at all, just wanting to make the Powers uncomfortable. The net result, anyway, was that the losers lost most of their imperial possessions and the winners took over. But in Europe, because the Powers were so wary of each other (and of Russia, which you'll recall had just had a Communist revolution), they split up Central Europe into a bunch of "autonomous" countries that really did nothing to promote self-determination, but definitely kept any one of the big Powers from glomming too much loot.

At least, that's my cynical interpretation of the Versailles treaty.

-- Mal