Vietnam This Week That Year

On April 30, 1975, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Cong marched into the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, hours after the last remaining American troops fled the city in a humiliating hurry and defeat. Saigon was subsequently renamed Ho Chi Minh City, honouring the inspiring communist war hero who died in 1969. A united Vietnam continues to have a one-party communist rule more than 50 years later, with the US and European Union making efforts not to ruffle Phnom Penh’s soft spot pertaining to issues like the Western concept of “democracy” and “liberal economic policy”. 

Deep-seated corruption and a steep fall in troops' morale hastened the defeat and collapse of the US and Saigon regime, propped up by the United States. The frequency with which more than 58,000 body bags from the Vietnam battlefields arrived in the US made Americans realise the futility of the war, which cost them men, money and morale. Protest rallies and the record of conscription dodgers had rib-cracking effects on the Richard Nixon administration. Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had committed his troops to a full-scale war in Vietnam in a departure from providing only technical advice and weapons initiated by President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in November 1963. 

Vice-President Johnson stepped in to complete the slain leader’s remaining term of 14 months, cashed in on public sympathy for the Democratic Party, and won the November 1968 presidential election for a full four-year term. But he escalated the war in his campaign to check the spread of communism and its likely domino effects on the region and beyond.

Horrendous costs

In contrast to the lethal, sophisticated weapons the US deployed, the communist Vietnamese demonstrated great talent for jungle warfare that slowed down and frustrated the better-equipped foreign force. This boosted the guerrillas’ confidence and morale, with the rest of the world awe-struck by the sheer zeal and willpower of Ho Chi Minh’s followers. 

By the time the war ended in a communist victory in April 1975, more than 58,000 American troops were killed and many more were injured. Two million civilians and 1.2 million Vietnamese from both sides of the divide lost their lives. The US had taken the plunge into the battle to defeat the communists and unite the North and South as a united Vietnam. Instead, the communist Viet Cong reduced the capitalist superpower to call it quits without looking behind.

The war cost was high. Fighting for their independent course that the West abhorred, the North Vietnamese pressed their way forward, inching toward the eventual victory. In the process, they lost lives in staggering numbers. But they succeeded in rejecting foreign imposition of ideology and proxy government. Had the US not been involved, so many men, women, and children would never have perished so tragically. The first seeds of American intervention in Vietnam were sown in 1955 during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. It got a fillip during Johnson’s time in office.

The anti-war campaign exerted increasing pressure on President Johnson’s administration, whose public approval rating had dipped sharply. Fighting the communists at the cost of thousands of their soldiers in another corner of the world did not convince the American people of the war logic their government gave. So much so that Johnson made a belated declaration that he would not seek a second term in the White House. Call it a war of attrition or a game of outlasting rivals in an armed conflict, the result is the same. Death, destruction and trauma for the victims on both sides of the killing field. Ukraine said so, and now Iran reiterates the theme. 

Like in a boxing ring where knockouts are rarer than points decisions, wars often do not result in complete losers and complete winners. The implications carry deep consequences for both sides of a conflict. For example, Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership invited a war on its doorstep. Essentially, NATO membership means free movement to its members for moving and stationing troops on the Ukrainian side of the 2000km-long border with Russia. This is not just blatantly provocative but crossing the deep red line as far as Moscow’s security is concerned. 

Communist experiment

Americans are disconcerted by the warming of ties between Hanoi and Beijing after the Ukraine war since 2022 and this year’s US-Israeli armed conflict with Iran. Karl Marx exhorted the workers of the world to unite as a like-minded international community with basic common interests and the objective of securing the dictatorship of the proletariat. In contradiction, however, the two communist countries’ differences came out in a two-week border war in 1979, which created distrust and a decline in their bilateral relations for a long. 

Today, communists of varied hues are imbued with their own individual interpretations of Marxism and national interests in a world whose existing order records a dwindling number of communist countries, with hardly half a dozen one-party communist rule. Envisaged in the mid-19th century, stirring great discomfort in the Western elite and citadels of capitalism, communism, as conceived by Marx and Engels, has never been experimented with in toto anywhere. 

The first country to embrace a communist system in 1917, amidst the First World War, in the Soviet Union, disintegrated in December 1991. Russia fell for a capitalist multiparty system. Its Eastern European followers, too, dumped their communist apparel to hungrily embrace the multiparty capitalist way. Of the few still upholding a communist banner as their motto now, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba remain closest to the communist state that Marx espoused. Except for Cuba, all other communist states share borders with China, with, of course, their own individual characteristics. 

Nicaragua was perhaps Latin America’s most serious effort at a communist experiment, but its signs of fervour fizzled out as dramatically as the initial events had promised the hard-core Marxists. The Sandinistas in the 1980s vacillated between the pressures of the post-Soviet international scenario and the required political pragmatism, but ended up in a situation slightly ahead of communist-turned capitalist Cambodia’s. 

(Kharel writes on int'l affairs & media.)