Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

Over dinner that same day, with Churchill also in attendance, Stalin again said he opposed a French return to Indochina. Roosevelt seized the opening to extol international accountability through trusteeships, carefully limiting his examples to French territories (New Caledonia in the Pacific, and Dakar on the west coast of Africa) so as to avoid offending the prime minister. Churchill was unimpressed. He pledged that Britain would seek no new territory after the war, but since the Big Four would be charged with maintaining postwar stability, they should be given individual control over certain strategically valuable areas. After Roosevelt took ill and retired for the night, Stalin continued to press Churchill on the need to keep France from reclaiming her empire. His concern was not the Indochinese people per se: He cared little about Southeast Asia, and his mistrust of Ho Chi Minh, dating back to their encounters in the 1920s, had not disappeared. Rather, he saw his stance as a means to weaken the European colonial empires more generally, and to ensure that the France that emerged from the war was a minor player on the world stage.24