....he really expected a nonviolent dissolution of Europe’s empires to give independence to Vietnam.
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Sounds like a reasonable expectation based on Englands actions .. I suppose approaching us was a “courtesy” move ... with us involved in Korea or just winding down and wanting to relax after WW2 and the French being unwilling to commit serious forces to oppose him the logical thing would have been to make a deal for VERY favorable trade terms and let him rule. Like all communist leaders he was all about the glory and money for himself... he could have had it.
“Sounds like a reasonable expectation based on Englands actions”
England took those actions 40 years after Versailles.
“the French being unwilling to commit serious forces to oppose him the logical thing would have been to make a deal for VERY favorable trade terms and let him rule.”
I’d imagine he approached us because France didn’t want to fight the war and we pushed them into it. We armed them (including lending them an aircraft carriers) to the point where French Indochina troops of the early 1950s are indistinguishable from US troops in Europe in the early 1940s (same helmets, radios, weapons, etc.). We were the ones advocating containment, not France.