One of Gordon Tullock’s colleagues at Yale felt strongly that we should not help the French in what was then French Indochina:
Although no admirer of the French empire, I preferred it to the Communists, but I also felt it an unimportant matter from the standpoint of American foreign policy. At the time I was a Foreign Service Officer on detached duty at Yale to study Chinese, so he obviously expected me to express my views on the subject. More correctly he thought that I would express the Department of State’s views.
I responded by saying that Europe was more important than Indochina and we were attempting to restore the remnant of Germany to prosperity and give it possibly a little strength. The French were impeding this and I thought an implicit trade in which we gave them some minor assistance in their empire and they at least moderated their objections to the restoration of Germany would be sensible. He did not object to my statement about the world, but said, “I don’t think we should do this kind of trading.” Although this was only one person, his phrase stuck to my memory as representative of a general climate of opinion among academics studying the Far East.