It was, for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony. It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia. That might even have led Japan to become the industrial and commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had so recently fought to establish. The remedy was clear—and largely achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military
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