ABSTRACT
When Dwight Eisenhower took office at the beginning of 1953, he inherited a stalemated war in Korea and a US mission in Indochina, the cost of which had ballooned during the Korean War. The President quickly sought an end to the fighting on the Korean peninsula, but hoped that France could continue to prosecute the conflict in Indochina. Observers estimated that if the US government accepted negotiations in Korea, it could not oppose a similar arrangement in Vietnam. Politically, no French government could afford to ignore any opportunity to end a war that had blighted the Republic since November 1946. The issue of Indochina thus strained relations between France, the British Commonwealth, and the United States. Guided by differing attitudes towards the strategy of containment and usefulness of negotiation with communist states, each of these governments sought to persuade their allies to follow a different course.
