Most American presidents have learned bad lessons in the American war in Vietnam, as it is called. The most recent presidential step is that of Donald Trump try to warn American diplomats in Vietnam Participation in the events of this country on April 30, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. The United States should do everything it can to engage with Vietnam, taking into account the interests of the two countries, but too often, the United States has only continued its own erroneous program in this country and elsewhere, with devastating human consequences.
The first and most fundamental error was the American refusal to let Vietnamese determine their own political reality. The French colonized in Vietnam, with Laos and Cambodia, and several American presidents, from Woodrow Wilson in 1919 to Harry Truman in 1945 in Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954, rose with the French. This despite the efforts of Ho Chi Minh to train its requests for American recognition by using the language of freedom and independence, including a comparison of the Vietnamese revolution in the American revolution.
Not all Vietnamese agrees with Ho, but it was his forces of Viet Minh who defeated the French in 1954. The United States then resumed the French colonial mission and prevented the reunification of the North and South. Southeast Asia was considered a focal point of the Cold War, a region that needed an American paternal orientation rather than self-determination. Like then-sen. John F. Kennedy said Vietnam in 1957“It is our offspring, … and if it is the victim of one of the dangers that threaten its existence – communism, political anarchy, poverty and others – then the United States, with a certain justification, will be held responsible, and our prestige in Asia will affect a new hollow.”
Kennedy committed an increasing number of American military members in Vietnam in the early 1960s. President Lyndon B. Johnson intensified this involvement in more than half a million soldiers in the late 1960s. He was premonitory at the political costs of the war: “If I left the woman I really liked – the big company – to implicate me in this dog on the other side of the world, So I would lose everything at home. ” Johnson refused to introduce himself to re -election, and Richard Nixon won, promising the “Vietnamization” of the war, as if it were not already the case.
If it is understandable that Americans focus on their own dead in Vietnam, that ethnocentric and nationalist concern represents reckless contempt for reality. In 1977, Jimmy Carter, roughly a president as liberal as ever to the White House, said about the war as “The destruction was mutual. “If Mutual implies a kind of symmetry, this is factually false.
In the 1960s, the United States underwent a kind of civil war from the American soul by which the conflict between the pro-war and anti-war factions mixed with other ruptures around the race, class, sex and more, ruptures that have continued to date in cultural wars. These conflicts can make Americans feel that they have paid a high price for the Vietnam War, a price in addition to the more than 58,000 Died.
But 3 million Vietnamese died on all sides. Hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians have died. And 1.7 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge genocide, a direct consequence of the war. Add the unknown figures that died in the rehabilitation camps and the tens of thousands of people who died as refugees. Thousands of others have died of terrestrial mines and unploded ammunition left behind. And the effects of the Orange agent are still manifested today in the disease and congenital malformations.
To avoid having to really face the amazing asymmetry of the Vietnam War, the Americans could prefer to believe Carter when he said: “We went to Vietnam without any desire to … impose an American desire on other people”, or President Obama when he said That the war was “a story of Americans … Patriots who braved the line of fire, who launched themselves in danger to save a friend, who fought time after hour, day after day to preserve the freedoms that we have expensive.”
Focusing on soldiers' sacrifices is the way Americans refuse to consider the true cost of Vietnam. Others consider the cost mainly as a loss of power and confidence that has taken years to restore. As President George HW Bush Put it in 1991“We kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all”, by which he meant that the success of operation Desert Storm would allow the United States to engage again in military adventures that his failure in Vietnam had claimed. This is unfortunately the corollary: American wars can be fought, with fewer American victims, an increasingly large American domination and less reports on the damage caused to non-Americans.
Instead, our presidents should have learned not to interfere with the wars of liberation and independence, not to invade Iraq or Afghanistan, and not to support authoritarian governments and not send bombs, weapons or help to Israel in his war in Gaza, who in the eyes of the Palestinians, many Americans and a large part of the rest of the world.
The argument that the war in Southeast Asia was a noble but defective effort, a failure of American innocence, was satiated by Graham Greene in his 1957 novel “The Quiet American. “” The full character of Greene, an idealistic agent of the CIA, thinks that he is in Vietnam who does good. When his actions led to a bombing that kills civilians, Alden Pyle says: “It was a shame, but you cannot always reach your target. Anyway, they died in a good cause … in a way, you might say that they died for democracy. ” The British journalist Cynique who became friends with Pyle is thinking about how the “innocent” Americans had conquered the Philippines, Hawaii, New Mexico and Puerto Rico, and concludes that “innocence is a kind of madness”.
And here the President Trump enters the scene, not like American calm like his predecessors but as a Ugly American.
Despite all his rudeness, Trump sometimes exposes hypocrisy and the claims of others, even if he is not aware. Referring to his own refusal to go to war, He would have said“You think I'm stupid; I was not going to Vietnam ”, which is at least more direct than Bill Clinton's postponement of postponement, and much more like him, which was apparently not stupid enough to go but was discreet enough not to say it of such a mode.
Trump too called dead American soldiers Previous wars “dryonnages” and “losers”. People were shocked, but many veterans have been disillusioned by Vietnam and other wars. They felt that their comrades died for nothing, or died taking into account the call to defend freedom and democracy to realize that “War is a racketFor the interests of businesses and the American power, the Major of the retired navy Smedley Butler said it after having thought about his military service in Haiti, Cuba, Mexico and Central America.
It is for these business interests and for American power that since April 30, 1975, the presidents have rebuilt relations with Vietnam. The ultimate irony is that the victorious Vietnamese and the defeated Americans both got what they wanted. For the Vietnamese winners, if not those who have lost, Vietnam is a free and independent nation, although the one that represses the political opinions of its citizens. For Americans, Vietnam is a capitalist economy open to business and a provisional ally against China. If the United States had simply let the Vietnamese determine its own future, the result would probably have been the same, less the millions of deaths.
US interventions haunt the United States. President Reagan saw Central America as the next Front of the Cold War after Southeast Asia. He threw his support for authoritarian regimes, including that of Salvador, whose army formed in the United States fought a brutal civil war which killed thousands and moved thousands of others, many of whom fled to the United States. Some have become gangsters and were expelled from their homes, where they terrorized their Salvadoran colleagues, creating the excuse for the terrifying termination of Cecot by President Nayib Bukele, where the United States now sends people without regular procedure.
It is therefore that we are caught in the return of the past. In Vietnam, the United States has strictly minimum to repair the ongoing effects of the war: helping in search of missing Vietnamese soldiers, paying some of the costs of the repair of land affected by dioxin, by suppressing unexplored ammunition. Trump's policies even jeopardize these efforts. Its ruinous prices and its impulse to ignore the 50th anniversary of the end of the war are snuggled meanness and bad diplomacy. Or it may be that he simply shares the illusion, the meaning, with regard to the United States, of being perpetually innocent.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2016, came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. His last book is “to save and to destroy: Writing as a other”. He teaches at the USC.
