Our Loss Was Our Gain in Vietnam

Sometimes it is better to lose.

Thirty years after the last helicopter beat a hasty retreat from a Saigon rooftop, U.S. credit card companies American Express and MasterCard were boldly advertised in Vietnam over the weekend on parade floats marking what was once thought to be an ignominious American defeat. If then-President Ford had not possessed the courage and wisdom to order the end of the U.S. occupation of Vietnam, we probably would still be embroiled in combating a never-ending insurgency.

Instead, the United States is now the biggest marketplace for exports from Vietnam, which began abandoning a failed centralized economy two decades ago in favor of Chinese-style capitalist market reforms. In defeat, the U.S. was able to economically exploit Vietnam without spending U.S. dollars and lives on a hopeless occupation. As reported Saturday in the Los Angeles Times by David Lamb, the newspaper's former Hanoi bureau chief, the main message from Hanoi's still avowedly communist leaders is that their country guarantees a favorable business environment for foreign investors.

"Ironically, if you took away the still-ruling Communist Party and discounted the perilous decade after the war, the Vietnam of today is not much different from the country U.S. policymakers wanted to create in the 1960s," Lamb wrote. "It is a peaceful, stable presence in the Pacific Basin, with an army that has been whittled down to 484,000 troops. Its economy, a mix of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, has the highest growth rate in Southeast Asia. Private enterprise is flourishing, a middle class is growing, poverty rates are falling. The United States is a major trading partner, and Americans are welcomed with a warmth that belies the two countries' history."

So, if it turns out we can get along just fine with a communist Vietnam, why did we once upon a time try to bomb it "back to the Stone Age," in the words of U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay?

The answer begins with the fact that the proponents of the Red Scare of the '50s and '60s grossly misunderstood the role of nationalism and self-determination in the ostensibly communist revolts that took power in Vietnam, China and elsewhere.