Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
unification had been postponed by only two years, or whether they felt that partition, even with the resultant risk of renewed military confrontation was, in reality, the best and only solution that the conflicting aims and pressures at Geneva could provide. The British, like the Russians, thought partition achieved their goal of re-establishing a stability, however precarious, in Southeast Asia. The Chinese did not gain as extensive a buffer zone as they had sought, but probably were satisfied to see the territorial establishment of the DRV; they could not (at that time) have been seriously concerned over a future threat from South Vietnam, since the Accords ruled out an extensive U.S. military presence there. The U.S. viewed the loss of North Vietnam as a political disaster, and immediately set about making treaty arrangements to prevent the loss of more Asian territory to Communism; but the U.S. was willing to accept partition as all that could be salvaged from a bad military situation. The Southeast Asia policy of the U.S. in the aftermath of the Geneva Conference was focused on organizing free Asian states against further inroads of Communism. The two Vietnams faced each other across a demilitarized zone. The DRV, manipulating a Viet Minh infrastructure in the South, waited for the elections, or for voracious political forces in the South to plunge the Saigon Government into chaos before election time arrived. South Vietnam began its attempt to establish complete control over its own countryside, and constantly decried the DRV's undemocratic handling of would-be migrants.
- c. Official Positions are in Agreement
On the surface, however, the parties to the Geneva Accords — with exception of the South Vietnamese Government — officially subscribed to the view that partition was, as the Final Declaration stated, only temporary. Moreover, and again with the GVN the exception, all the parties concluded that partition was the only realistic way to separate the combatants, meet the widely divergent military and political demands of the French and Viet Minh, and conclude an armistice.
- d. The Outcome Could Have Been Predicted
But such assertions did not affect the practical import of the Geneva documents. By creating two regimes responsible for "civil administration" (Article 14.a. of the Vietnam Armistice Agreement), by providing for the regroupment of forces to two zones and for the movement of persons to the zone of their choice, and by putting off national elections for two years, the conferees, whatever their intentions, made a future political settlement for Vietnam unlikely. The separation of Vietnam at the 17th parallel was designed to facilitate the armistice, but in fact it also facilitated the development of two governments under inimical political philosophies, foreign policies, and socio-economic systems. Thus, reunification through elections remained as remote in Vietnam as in Korea or Genmany. "Elections," as Victor Bater has
