In February 1950, when the Truman administration extended formal recognition to the State of Vietnam and material aid to the French effort to reestablish a crumbling empire, American officials never imagined the quarter-century-long Vietnam War would be the ultimate result. The French had, for several years, been attempting to beat back Vietnamese nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh fighters and to reimpose colonial rule in Vietnam. Significant American military intervention remained relatively far off. The United States had only recently begun to formulate any policy toward Southeast Asia. Vietnam, alongside Laos and Cambodia, remained primarily a French problem that compelled U.S. monetary aid. Direct American interest in Southeast Asia was only very slowly developing. In just a few short years, however, global conditions had changed dramatically. French ambitions in Vietnam had been thwarted by 1954. Japan had been substantially rebuilt and needed regional trade partners. From Guatemala and the Congo to Egypt and Indonesia, a global cold war and the end of colonialism brought greater instability and the threat of independent nationalist leaders around the world bent on pursuing neutralist foreign policy and nationalist domestic policy agendas. In the United States, intellectuals, policy makers, and others had begun to refine and implement ideas for controlling what they perceived to be the most undesirable and dangerous aspects of this unstable global environment through economic aid and modernization in former colonial areas.