At Geneva, Dulles pressed the British to join the fight against Communism in Vietnam. To the Americans, the looming threat from China had turned the anticolonial battle in Vietnam into a struggle of global importance. But the British were not interested. Unlike the United States, Britain recognized the PRC as the legal government of China in January 1950. When it became clear that the conference would not block the rise of the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, Dulles withdrew, the only time in US history that a secretary of state abandoned a Big Power conference before it ended.
