I'm doing a paper on the vietnam war and what kept the US engaged in the conflict, and looking at it economically I'm wondering if the two nations were trade partners prior to the war.
I've found a press conference that Eisenhower held in 1954 (april 7th to be exact) in which he mentions that certain products from the area [Indochina] are important to the world, these products inlude:
What I'm wondering is whether or not the US specifically got these products from Vietnam (or from other areas in southeast asia) before the war, or if the US got such materials from other trade partners. Were the US and Vietnam even tradepartners prior to the conflict?
I'm having a lot of trouble finding any info on this so I asked in here instead. i hope it doesn't violate your homework rule, or any other rules for that matter.
This is a bit tricky since prior to 1949 Vietnam was part of French Indochina, and until 1954 was still within the French Union. It's economy was tied into that colonial network and Asian trade more than to the United States. For example, Vietnam exported a great deal of rice to China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Keep in mind too that the U.S. provided over 800 million in aid to France and the Indochinese states between 1949-1954. You can find specific details in the economic yearbooks for the State of Vietnam (1949-1955), the predecessor to the Republic of Vietnam. The editions prior to 1955 will be available in French and Vietnamese only.
Since the U.S. itself wasn't heavily reliant on Indochina -- and after 1945 the war had greatly reduced its export potential -- you may want to explore how American policymakers thought about the economic potential of Indochina, rather than the statistics for, say, 1950-1954. Are they interested in tin, coal, and rice for the US market? Or to help U.S. allies in Asia? Or are they concerned more with denying those raw materials to the Soviet bloc countries?
To pursue the second question, you could begin with a book by Michael Schaller called The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (1985).
I would also suggest using the FRUS series, which is a compilation of important government documents grouped by year and region. If you use the Boolean search, you can find all the documents where 'rubber' and 'Vietnam' are mentioned, and so on. There you see exactly how policymakers thought about Vietnam's economic potential.