Cal Thomas visits Vietnam where, “It has been 50 years since President John F. Kennedy ordered U.S. ‘advisers’ to South Vietnam to help battle the communist North and 37 years since the end of that divisive war and the country’s unification under Communism. Today, Vietnam is fighting a war with itself:”
As in many other one-party states, the Internet remains a powerful counterforce to managed information. The U.S. Embassy provides, and the government mostly allows, an information center where students and others can log onto iPads and search for information that is often counter to the government line.
The old guard remains suspicious about American objectives, seeing economic and political liberalization as a strategy to achieve among the Vietnamese people what America failed to in pursuing their “hearts and minds” in the war.
Professor Carlyle A. Thayer of the University of New South Wales, an expert on Vietnam, said recently, “Vietnam is motivated to keep the U.S. engaged in Southeast Asia, and the South China Sea in particular, as a balance to China,” which claims some territorial rights in conflict with Vietnam and is a formidable economic and military power on its northern border.
Vietnam is in transition, and it is unrealistic to expect too much progress too quickly. Considering where it was when the U.S. left in 1975, the country appears to be inching in a positive direction. Those Americans who died here left behind the seeds of democracy, capitalism and a desire for prosperity and freedom. Whatever one’s view of that war, it can be said they did not die in vain.
As America keeps “progressing” in a continually backward direction, I wonder how we’ll look in 40 years?
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