Why Did the US Intervene in the Vietnam War between 1946 and 1956?

After WWII, French colonialism was in motion once more in Vietnam, a country that had been previously colonized by France, followed by Japan after the former fell in 1940. The country's road to nationalism, socialism and eventually communism, was paved over decades of defiance and insurgency, in face of foreign imperialism and domestic corruption within the government. The reasons why the US intervened between 1954 and 1964 can only be understood within the larger context of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and is chiefly a byproduct of imperialism and containment policy, alongside the…