American involvement in the Vietnam War

The USA involved itself in the Vietnam War because they wrongly interpreted a nationalist civil war as an extension of the domino theory. The Americans had a strong belief that the war was being fought to spread communism around the world. The US gradually became more involved as the fear of communism spread, but involved themselves entirely in 1954 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Because of the mentality of the cold war, the fall of China to communism and the Korean War; they believed that it was just another communist movement when in actual truth, the Vietnamese wanted to gain control over their country. The USA could not see that the Vietnamese communists were just as much nationalists, they interpreted it as a world wide communist movement, and this then created a war that would persist for many years.

The US was against signing the Geneva agreement for two reasons, one was that they didn’t agree with their proposals, which were to prohibit foreign troops into Vietnam, ...