"Similar points can be made about France, with the focus here being France’s enforced withdrawal from Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) in 1954 after defeat at the hands of a Communist nationalist movement supported by the Communist great powers. The Cold War there took on the character of the War of the French Succession. France, and to some extent Britain, tried to steer American policy toward intervention in Indochina from about 1948, at least in part for financial reasons. Within France, the Communists were kept from power, while their power in the trade unions was seen as a strategic, political and economic threat. The focus on the fate of Western empires approach is less valid for Eastern Europe and Latin America, both prior to World War Two and subsequently; although in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s and 1970s the fate of the Belgian and, still more, Portuguese empires played a major role in the Cold War."