The “two-camp theory” prompted Vietnamese communists to instigate a civil war – the Fourth Civil War for Vietnam – to neutralize domestic rivals immediately after World War II ended. When France initiated its recolonization of Vietnam and the rest of Indochina in fall 1945, Chapter 2 relates, many Vietnamese noncommunist nationalists and other victims of communist attacks and repression opted to collaborate with its armies, for the time being. Thus, the French war in Vietnam became entwined with the Vietnamese Civil War; it also significantly augmented national fracturing and fratricidal violence. French manipulation, a misreading of Vietnamese political realities, and the intensifying state of the Cold War prompted the United States to intrude. By the time of the climactic Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in spring 1954, the United States was footing nearly 80 percent of the French war bill, and Washington policymakers had become obsessed with the evolving situation across the Indochinese Peninsula. The Geneva accords of July 1954 concluded the French War and paused the Vietnamese Civil War by creating two Vietnams separated at the Seventeenth Parallel.

The French empire both expired and morphed into something else after World War II. A postwar “French Union” uneasily blended republicanism and federalism. Two wars of decolonization mirrored each other. The war in Indochina (1945–54) had relatively little to do with French identity but had a great deal to do with the Cold War in Asia. A communist insurgency gradually became a North Vietnamese state aligned with communist China and the Soviet Union. France would bequeath its war of decolonization to the United States after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The war of Algerian independence (1945–62) had little to do with the Cold War but a great deal to do with French identity. The irresistible force of anti-colonial resistance met the immovable object of settler intransigence. The Fourth Republic crumbled in the wake of the conflict, leaving the Fifth Republic to negotiate the independence of a settler colony that had been national territory since 1848. The constitution of 1958 created a more consensual “French Community,” which applied mostly to the French domains in Africa. “Decolonization,” particularly in West Africa, came to mean political independence and international recognition coupled with continued economic and political links to France.