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Because of outside pressures brought to bear by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, Vietnam's delegates to the Geneva conference agreed to temporarily partition their nation at the seventeenth parallel. Drawn up in the shadow of the Korean War, which had ended just the year before, the Geneva agreement was an awkward peace for all sides. The Geneva Peace Accords, signed by France and the Communist leadership of Vietnam in the summer of 1954, reflected the strains of the international Cold War. As the two sides came together to discuss the terms of the peace in Geneva, Switzerland, international events were already shaping the future of Vietnam. This decisive battle convinced the French that they could no longer maintain their Southeast Asian colonies, and Paris quickly sued for peace.

In July 1954, after years of bloody fighting, Communist forces under the direction of General Vo Nguyen Giap defeated the allied French troops at Dien Bien Phu, a remote mountain outpost in the northwest corner of Vietnam.

The Vietnam War, 1954–1975, grew out of the long conflict between France and Vietnam, the result of one hundred years of French colonial rule.