* On December 7 1941, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbour.
* And the world celebrated.
* As De Gaulle said “that’s it, the war’s over."
* He was totally confident in U.S. superiority.
* He must have been part American.
* Unfortunately FDR’s confidence in de Gaulle was much lower.
* He hated him.
* And the more powerful de Gaulle became, the less sure FDR was that the French should get their colonies back after the war.
* But if Indochina and potentially other colonies should not be returned to the colonial powers after the war, what should happen to them?
* Roosevelt proposed a trusteeship formula by which the colonies would be raised to independence through several stages.
* Those not ready for independence—which in FDR’s view included all of France’s possessions—would be placed under a nonexploitive international trusteeship formed by the United Nations.
* In laying out this plan to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in March 1943, the president singled out Indochina as an area that should be controlled by this new system.
* Eden, who would end up playing a huge role in Britain’s Indochina policy for the next dozen years, wondered outlaid whether FDR was being too harsh on the French.
* FDR just ignored him and said that France should be prepared to place part of her overseas territory under the authority of the United Nations.
* Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, the man who wrote the original draft of the UN charter, Mr Ol’ Black Threesome himself, asked "But what about the American pledges to restore to France her possessions?"
* Roosevelt replied that those pledges applied only to North Africa.
* Sumner thought “hmmmm I bet there’s a lot of blacks in North Africa…."
* FDR’s trusteeship sounded a lot of like Wilson’s mandate system that divided up the Middle East after WWI.
* But this was going to be totally different.
* Because it had a different name.
* The way he saw it, the enforcement mechanism would be a greater degree of international accountability.
* As before, the core principle was that a colonial territory is not the exclusive preserve of the power that controls it but constitutes a “sacred trust” over which the international community has certain responsibilities.
* Eden knew that this was old wine in new bottles, and he didn’t like the taste.
* He and others in the Foreign Office suspected the Americans of seeking to use trusteeships to their own economic advantage—the “international supervision of colonies” would simply be a smoke screen by which America could facilitate access to the economic resources of the colonies and spread her influence globally.
* And the British didn’t like the sound of “international supervision”, especially of their own colonies.
* He suggested other countries would, at most, had an advisory capacity.
* FDR though insisted that it be an international trusteeship.
* So the Brits just changed the subject, talked about black threesomes, and that was that.
* So FDR went to Cairo for his only wartime meeting with Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of China’s Kuomintang nationalist government.
* FDR wanted Chiang on board with his trusteeship program.
* But Chiang resisted, expressing a preference for outright independence for Indochina and other Asian colonies.
* Probably because it would make them easier for him to take over.
* FDR tried to sweeten the deal by saying he supported the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule.
* So Chiang said “go tell Winny The Poo that, then come back and talk to me about Indochina."
* Meanwhile, the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong, who had been waging an intermittent struggle against Chiang’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government since
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