Ironically, Ho Chi Minh had been among those who for a long time resisted drawing this conclusion about America and her role. For thirty years, from the 1910s until 1948–49, he clung to the hope that the United States was different—a new kind of world power that had been born out of an anticolonial reaction and was an advocate of self-determination for all nations, large and small. Like many deeply held beliefs, this one had taken root early, when the twenty-something Ho visited Boston and New York in 1912–13 and a few years later read Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The United States, he
...more
