![]() ![]() Eisenhower supported a series of multilateral agreements that created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the creation of a counterrevolutionary force south of the seventeenth parallel that would oppose Ho Chi Minh and his followers in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), or North Vietnam. To that end, Dulles and President Dwight D. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thought that the political protocols of the accords gave too much power to Vietnamese Communists, and he was not going to allow the Communists to take southern Vietnam without a fight. The United States did not support the accords. Furthermore, the Communists believed they were well organized to take southern Vietnam through political action alone, a prediction that did not come to pass. The Communist superpowers favored this agreement because they feared that a provocative peace that demanded communist control of all of Vietnam would anger France and its powerful ally, the United States, and they did not want to risk another confrontation with the West so soon after Korea. According to the terms of the Geneva Accords, Vietnam would hold national elections in 1956 to reunify the country. Because of outside pressures brought to bear by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, Vietnam's delegates to the Geneva conference agreed to temporarily partition their nation at the seventeenth parallel. Drawn up in the shadow of the Korean War, which had ended just the year before, the Geneva agreement was an awkward peace for all sides. The Geneva Peace Accords, signed by France and the Communist leadership of Vietnam in the summer of 1954, reflected the strains of the international Cold War. As the two sides came together to discuss the terms of the peace in Geneva, Switzerland, international events were already shaping the future of Vietnam. ![]() This decisive battle convinced the French that they could no longer maintain their Southeast Asian colonies, and Paris quickly sued for peace. In July 1954, after years of bloody fighting, Communist forces under the direction of General Vo Nguyen Giap defeated the allied French troops at Dien Bien Phu, a remote mountain outpost in the northwest corner of Vietnam. The Vietnam War, 1954–1975, grew out of the long conflict between France and Vietnam, the result of one hundred years of French colonial rule. ![]()
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