vietnam

Vietnam Conquered the Cold War Itself

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Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon and the reunification of Vietnam after almost a century of colonial and great power meddling. It was the first full blown American military defeat since Red Cloud’s War over a century before and the culmination of wise long term strategy on the part of the Vietnamese. The human cost was immense and the danger was not yet over, as the Sino-Soviet Split was about to go hot in Southeast Asia. Within almost no time at all Vietnamese forces would be ejecting the Khmer Rogue from power in neighboring Cambodia, toppling what had to have been the worst (adjusted for population and size) government of the 20th Century in the process, and incurring a retaliatory and ultimately ineffective limited invasion by the Chinese in 1979 (tacitly backed by a bitter US).

The Sino-Soviet Split preceded these events by about a decade, and Nixon and Mao’s diplomacy was basically a sealant on the end of the Cold War’s ideological phase. Vietnam, fighting what was always first and foremost an anti-colonial struggle, already knew this. The proximity and domineering attitude of the Chinese always meant that the USSR was a superior partner (this was the reverse of most communist states’ interests, showing the importance of geographic proximity), and that the security concerns of Chinese power projection could not be ignored. First was driving out the French and the Americans, then came dealing with a diplomatic assertion of independence in the near abroad. Sovereignty is not just ejecting foreign dominion, but asserting a ‘clear field’ over ones autonomy of action in diplomacy, similar to the difference between an actual planet and a dwarf planet, one isn’t all the way there if the baycenter of its orbit with a moon lies outside the primary central mass.

So Vietnam served as an obvious example of small state realpolitik in action. Less by actively seeking to be part of the preexisting Sino-Soviet Split and more by ignoring it entirely as it focused on more pressing matters. The world responded accordingly after Vietnam took action. More importantly, this was not just a part of the war of independence, but rather a hint of what was to come. Both Vietnamese and Chinese diplomacy dropped all pretense of being anything but national interest-based after this. Vietnam sought diplomatic connections with many abroad regardless of regime type, while China focused on anti-Soviet activities for the remainder of the Cold War. This even included support of the Afghan Mujahedeen. With the loss of its great power patron in the fall of the USSR in 1991, Vietnam immediately began to pivot to normalizing relations with the United States, something that would occur at the end of the decade. Since that time, maudlin Boomer tears for the doomed mafia-like client state of South Vietnam aside, the two countries have largely had positive relations. The U.S. has even worked to redirect offshoring away from China and towards Vietnam for reasons of obvious mutual benefit.

This has not meant that Vietnam has pursued hostile relations with the Chinese. Far from it, it attempts a kind of cautious neutrality and guarded openness to its giant neighbor. Something currently paying dividends as Hanoi becomes targeted by an erratic and undirected US trade policy. The true lesson of the Cold War, something the Vietnamese learned that the Americans and Russians often did not, is that globally-focused ideology in foreign policy is a leash. The smaller the country, the shorter the leash.

Despite having the formative events of its modern state tied up with the Cold War almost like no other state around today, Vietnam serves as an example of keeping grand political projects localized and non-universal. The freedom and security of their nation and their diplomatic autonomy always came first. They would have their own path to sovereignty, divergent from others. This is, after all, the point of independence and national unity.

Ho Chi Minh was scorned at Versailles by the imperious universalist Woodrow Wilson, but maintained an admiration for George Washington, one of the preeminent examples of turning an independence war into a diplomatic posture of non-alignment. This was the correct path as the war that Americans were told was necessary to maintain world order, which they were willing to kill millions to keep going, ultimately didn’t matter. The two countries live with each other and have largely constructive relations. Vietnam had no global capacity or ambitions, and the United States, so used to both itself and the Soviets, had to be reminded that sometimes all politics really are just local. And yet if you go to Vietnam in person in the 21rst Century, as I have, you’ll find nothing but water under the bridge. The world moved on. Geopolitics is always in flux. And in a world where constant rebalancing, entropy, and changing circumstances reign supreme there can be no universal principle save adaptability. Those who embrace this reality can outperform those who refuse to.

Vietnam didn’t just beat France and America, it beat the idea of a Cold War itself. In doing so it ensured its own success. This is worth remembering today when modern people try to tell us we live in a world of ‘freedom vs authoritarianism’ or ‘a new Cold War’. Any state that engages with the rest of the world as part of some kind of Platonic/existential struggle will meet only disaster, while the agility of the practical and situationally positioned states will run rings around them.

But lest you think I have only negative things to mention about the failed experiment of South Vietnam, check this out:

Despite all the Agent Orange, the Jungle Grows Back

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

Fighting wildfires

The DPRK-USA summit in Vietnam is about to start. Given the generations that have passed since a frozen armistice was put in place and the decidedly erratic character of the American president I will withhold from speculating on how effective such talks will be. I do support having them, however. Everyone should. There is not a person on this Earth that would benefit, long term, from renewed hostilities on the Korean peninsula. Even the usually gleeful for conflict types in policy and business would suffer when China, now a nuclear armed nation came to the DPRK’s defense. Though we do not presently look like we are are staring down the barrel of such a confrontation, leaving the festering sore of nonexistent relations between Pyongyang and much of the rest of the world is of little benefit to anyone.

My concern here is that Pyongyang has an astute eye on Venezuela, and rightfully so. Saddam Hussein had no up to date weapons of mass destruction but for domestic reasons could not come out and say it. His lack of them hardly prevented the war that came his way. Qaddafi then saw an opportunity for his nation to be lifted from U.S. sanctions and in return give Bush a (minor) victory by renouncing such weapons. This failed to save him from an attack launched by the Obama administration under heavy pressure from Britain and France. This taught the world, and especially Syria, that it wasn’t worth giving up your WMD’s. In fact, it might be just what you need to make more powerful foes think twice. Everyone knows Israel, which once was subjected to endless conventional attack, has not been so attacked since it (unofficially) became a nuclear power. Everyone knows that North Korea’s bargaining position has been stronger since it became one. The intercontinental ballistic missile is the ultimate sovereignty guarantor.

Meanwhile, while this noteworthy and laudable attempt to normalize relations with North Korea goes forward, the US is attempting at the very same time to topple the government of Venezuela. This is extremely counter productive and will put Pyongyang on edge. Considering that all factions in Venezuela are unpopular, and that so far most of the army seems to be sticking with Caracas, it flirts with the risk of conflict or disruption that could set off another wave of migrants and conflict. Even if it does not, outside of private corporate interests who seek the Venezuelan economy opened to them, the average American stands no chance at benefiting from any major US-backed operation there…but will no doubt pick up the tab for it as always. Indeed, Maduro’s popularity is extremely low but not lower than Macron’s (who arguably treats opposition protesters worse), and opposition to US military intervention in that country is significantly higher than even the percentage of the people who want Maduro gone. If they want him gone, they will do it their way.

So far of candidates running for high office, only Tulsi Gabbard has raised a voice of opposition to our destabilizing actions in Venezuela, particularly at this sensitive time. The odds are high that if reaching a deal is more difficult than expected this would be the reason why.

This is just one issue among many that one could point to in order to make the counter-point to a growing Beltway-Lanyard narrative about America’s supposed withdrawal from the world. Robert Kagan, a well respected prognosticator despite a very long record of supporting failed policies, uses the phrase ‘the jungle grows back.’ We often see this narrative used increasingly by democrats and ‘never Trump’ conservatives to critique Trump from the neoconservative right. They are setting up a false binary where we must choose between pure isolationism and endless brushfire-war militarism. This is obviously false because there is quite simply no way the worlds largest economy could return to anything resembling prewar ‘isolationism’, much less give up its numerous diplomatic ties.

There is this assumption that undoing World War Two, the crucible of American world domination, lurks as a potential in every part of the world. But the Second World War was not normal, it was bizarre. Most of human history does not have quite so large conflicts in all out total war for global hegemony where the triumph of one side was so clearly preferable than to the other. The circumstances that made the prewar era do not exist any longer. And most tellingly, it would hardly be the United States to which much of the world would look to for deliverance at this point in time. This is because rather than intelligently shoring up its position once its last remaining true rival, the Soviet Union, fell in 1991, the United States has gone on not to uphold the stability to the post Cold War world but to endlessly undermine it. In so doing it has not only undermined its own position through over-expansion, but also made itself the most feared and least trusted nation on planet Earth. Trump’s bumbling obviously doesn’t help, but this problem dates back on some level to the over-expansion of NATO in the Clinton administration and especially from the unhinged Bush Jr. presidency. If the rest of the world doing its thing is the jungle, then we are Agent Orange. And the overreach of so much of our consensus foreign policy has made a lot of those jungle dwellers nostalgic for the days without chemically induced mutation.

In my time at the State Department I often found that the foreign service officers who had served in countries that struck an independent course of self sufficiency were often the ones more content with their ‘hardship’ (not fully developed nation) postings. Prewar Syria and Belarus were commonly lauded places to be. There is, perhaps, a reason why foreign service officers are restricted to two years per post abroad. You don’t want them getting any funny ideas about countries pursuing independent paths of development.

This needs to be kept in mind when doing big diplomatic negotiations like the one currently in Vietnam. A country that we dumped endless amounts of chemicals on, then left, and allowed the jungle to grow back. Now Vietnam is doing better than ever before in modern history *and* has positively warm relations with the United States. Diplomacy, its cheap and effective and our war to preserve the artificial construction of South Vietnam was for nothing. But in addition to hard power backing up diplomacy it also needs the soft power of knowing you are reliable and trustworthy.

Many in North Korea may be looking at Venezuela and wondering how many concessions it is worth giving the United States. It didn’t have to be this way, and it sure doesn’t in the future. There is a professional and political class in desperate need of replacing.