Ho was a nationalist Vietnamese first.....we should not have allowed the french to try to reclaim Indochina after they lost it to the Japs
It cost us and the locals plenty
Ho was a collectivist but I don’t think he was the hegemon we painted him as .
He likely if allowed his election after WWII would have remained a USA ally
“Ho was a nationalist Vietnamese first....”
In 1920, 20 year old Ho Chi Minh (or whatever his actual name is) attended the Congress of the Socialist Party of France. He wanted French socialists to join Lenin’s Comintern. By 1923 he was in Moscow as a high ranking member of the Comintern.
During the long nationalist war against French rule in Indochina Ho spent his energy betraying his fellow united front leaders who weren’t Viet Minh. Ho wasn’t just a Marxist, he was a committed Leninist. Kill off any rivals to future power. As with Fidel Castro, the story line that Ho was a potential ally of the US is leftwing fiction designed to mask what he really was.