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This article returns to the 19th century to understand how and why American leaders ended up attributing exceptional strategic importance to Indochina. This essay argues that one cannot understand American intervention in Indochina after 1945 without considering the wider geopolitical and imperial context in the Pacific. For better or worse, Americans made Indochina into the linchpin of a defensive line designed to protect American interests not only in Southeast Asia, but throughout the Pacific, the “American Lake” behind which a maritime empire had stood since the 19th century. This fixation would lead Americans to intervene indirectly in Indochina by supporting the French against Ho Chi Minh, and would then lead them directly into their own war in Vietnam in the 1960s.