The fledgling government was only “fledgling” because the CIA installed and then helped destabilize an unpopular, anti-democratic government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_South_Vietnamese_coup
>And I also agree that 'Imperialism' is a stretch because US actions in Japan, South Korea etc. aren't even remotely related to classical Imperialism. Heck, the US gave Japan a constitution, democracy, and even made sure that women had the right to vote, despite Japanese objection!
Japan was a democracy prior to the war, with universal male suffrage beginning in the late 1920s. It devolved into fascism through a series of internal coups.
It’s great that suffrage was extended to women post war. What wasn’t so great was when the US government absolved, rehabilitated, and financed the former fascists and more or less handed the country back over to them to stop talking the rise of any legitimate, democratic left-wing rule of the country. And this was despite the fact that many leftists in Japan had fought, been imprisoned, and died trying to stop the war and atrocities by the fascists. Amazingly, this effort was led by the CIA-backed war criminal, Nobusuke Kishii under the guise of stopping the “socialist threat” to Japan (quite rich since he and his pals dragged the country into a war that caused untold devastation and destruction).
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi
In South Korea, the US backed Syngman Rhee, another fascist who killed tens of thousands of people he perceived to be his left-wing opponents. This unchecked political violence legitimized the cause of Kim Il-Sung and threw the country into a devastating civil war that has been terrible for everyone on the peninsula for the past 70 years. And in spite of all of this, the US continued to back right-wing dictators in South Korea until they were pushed out by a popular uprising in the 1980s (the true origin of South Korean democracy, not the sham the US installed).
If you want to understand the reality of US imperialism, I suggest you not blindly accept popular narratives about what the US did postwar, especially in SE Asia. There are plenty of history texts written on the subject.