This article elucidates the role of personalism in Ngô Đình Diệm’s relations with his principal anticommunist allies in Asia by considering the First Republic’s involvement in the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League and Moral Re-Armament. These organizations provided crucial transnational platforms through which Ngô Đình Diệm secured support for his personalist vision. Shared beliefs about the spiritual and moral threat of communist materialism, and the spiritual revolution it demanded in response, undergirded Ngô Đình Diệm’s anticommunist alliances in Asia. The First Republic’s deep involvement in these regional organizations, which operated free from US influence, challenges prevailing conceptions of its engagement with Cold War Asia.

This article examines the Special Commissariat for Civic Action as an instrument for nation-building in the First Republic of Vietnam. Originally, the Special Commissariat was intended to serve as a means to fill the power vacuum in the countryside that emerged in the wake of the departure of the Việt Minh cadres relocated to the North, as required by the Geneva Accords. Over time, the Special Commissariat would become tied into Ngô Đình Diệm's larger nation-building agenda of creating a viable, noncommunist South Vietnam capable of standing independently among the nations of the so-called “free world.”