By PHK
“Realpolitik” trumps “democratization” in US foreign policy for a change
Ironic isn’t it that our illustrious Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has finally discovered Vietnam while the CIA and the Pentagon have been playing with fire in Somalia - helping to destabilize that warlord torn country even further. Interesting, too that Condi apparently decided to wait until Rummy was on the other side of the globe at an IISS conference and far from his phalanx of neocons to announce a major shift in US policy towards Iran. Or maybe it was just coincidence.
It’s unfortunate that Rummy’s Vietnam discovery was couched in terms of containing the Chinese. Regardless, rapprochement with Hanoi makes sense for any number of reasons. Economic realities head my list. In fact, US-Vietnamese relations were reestablished under President Clinton in July 1995 after a hiatus of twenty years. This bipartisan effort happened with strong support from former POW Senator John McCain.
Nice to see that the W administration’s chief attack dog has finally caught on too - even if it comes over a decade after the opening first began.
The irony, of course, is that despite all the “democratizing and transformational diplomacy” rhetoric coming out of the administration these days, Rummy’s new friends, the Vietnamese, operate a Communist regime. In fact, their brand of Communism makes the Chinese look good.
Yes, the Vietnamese have permitted some joint ventures – principally luxury tourist hotels and apparel factories, if I remember correctly, the latter which I saw adjacent to recently built highways near Hanoi’s airport when I toured Vietnam from south to north in 2002. And yes, Vietnam’s major trading partner is now the U.S.
But Vietnam still has a long way to go to begin to compete with the Chinese or most of the rest of Southeast Asia on the economic front. The Vietnamese Communist Party leadership, desperately clinging to the trappings of Communism to retain political power, not the trademark characteristic of the hardworking Vietnamese, keeps this economy from blossoming. I remember exiting the country through Hanoi’s recently opened new, and at the time, underused internationally designed international passenger air terminal when I was there in 2002 as well as visiting Hanoi’s first modern shopping mall where excited people of all ages were riding the escalator for the first time. Both small steps in the right direction but nothing compared to Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines or even the PRC.
Vietnam is still Communist
But Vietnam’s system was and still is Communist with the Communist Party firmly in control and far too many impoverished Vietnamese - a high percentage under age 25 - throughout the country. As a South Vietnamese engineer – who had an application filed to immigrate to the US with his family – told me at the time: “Vietnam has lost at least 25 years.” He was right. In comparison with neighboring Thailand where business was booming despite the after effects of the 1997 Asian financial crisis that was supposed to have taken the country to its knees, Vietnam looked like Cinderella in rags sitting at the feet of a favored stepsister garbed in silks and decked out in rubies and sapphires.
Convenient absent-mindedness
So, I guess the Pentagon can conveniently forget about the “democratization” mantra when it suits its parochial needs - or maybe it’s just more comfortable dealing with an officially atheist authoritarian government than – oh, my gosh – an Islamic one that employs the Sharia law code to keep its citizens in line but just might also curb rampaging warlords.
Yes, Vietnam is reasonably strategically important in a Southeast Asian context. And China has, for centuries, been an enemy of the Vietnamese. Had the US considered the latter fact during the 1950s and 1960s and had it been willing to deal with Ho Chi Minh who was foremost a Vietnamese nationalist looking for ways to propel his country from backward French colony to mid-20th century prosperity maybe we would not have lost 58,000 young Americans in a war that need not have happened. 
When I was in graduate school, I came upon a letter from then French war correspondent Bernard Fall to his Syracuse University political science dissertation advisor Margaret Fisher in which he described his recent reporting trips to North Vietnam and a meeting he had had with Ho Chi Minh and his advisors in the early to mid 1950s – and how pro-American the Vietnamese had been at the time. Fall was far from alone in his assessment of the North’s motives and proclivities – top American scholars of Vietnam at the time and decades later also agreed.
But somehow, the anti-Communist crusade launched by America’s right wing and carried to extremes by elements of both parties trumped foreign policy realism then as today’s simplistic anti-Islamist terrorist hue and cry hampers the administration’s ability to act strategically in dealing with profound differences in the Muslim world. Let’s hope that Condi’s recent opening – as school-marmish as it may sound – to the Iranians will help begin to change that calculus. And sending Rumsfeld on frequent trips to Southeast Asia might also not be a bad idea.
Photo and map credits:
Maps of Vietnam and Southeast Asia from the Perry-Castanada Map Collection, University of Texas;
Photos of Vietnam by PHKushlis, 2002 1) Communist Party banners on party office, Hanoi, Vietnam; 2) Village market on road between Hanoi and Halong Bay, Vietnam; 3) Guard at Ho Chi Minh's Tomb, Hanoi, Vietnam.