Did we win in Viet Nam?

Excerpted essay by John O'Sullivan (editor, National Interest):

Vietnam on the Mind

HANOI, SAIGON, NHA TRANG — ... [i]f Vietnam is to be the comparison of first
resort in whatever conflict the U.S. finds itself, we need a better
understanding of its general significance.

Vietnam was really two wars — a war between the Communist North and the
anti-Communist South, and a local skirmish in the Cold War that pitted the U.S.
and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies. North Vietnam won the
first of those wars in 1975 — or so it seemed at the time. But the ruthless
imposition of a Stalinist straitjacket on the whole of Vietnam led not only to
the forced departure of hundreds of thousands of "boat people" but also to
hopeless economic stagnation. Victory brought not prosperity but poverty and
isolation.

Eventually the North Vietnamese political leadership realized that reform was
necessary and in 1988 embarked on a program of liberalization on the Chinese
model — that is, a gradualist program of free-market economic reforms under a
continuing one-party "socialist" government.

Market reforms were slow, reluctant and inadequate at first, but they have
accelerated sharply in the last three years. While Vietnam is still a very poor
country — its annual per capita income is only $477 compared to South
Korea¹s $18,000 — it is growing rapidly. A visitor to the cities like Hanoi
and Saigon is overwhelmed by signs of economic vitality, of small business
growth, of a building boom, and above all of a youthful, Westernized, energetic
population.

About 70 percent of the Vietnamese were born in the aftermath of the war of
which they have little memory and apparently less resentment. ...

[A] Martian landing in Saigon or Hanoi today with no knowledge of history since
1970 would assume that the South must have won the war. These cities have all
the boutiques and designer labels of London or Venice — and more homegrown
entrepreneurial vitality than both. (He would probably dismiss the occasional
hammer-and-sickle in neon lights or Red Star poster as the kind of kitsch
nostalgia for Marxism-Leninism found also in Manhattan night-clubs or on
Paris¹s left Bank.)

A few years ago, the more far-sighted Vietnamese had a saying: "Our past is
French; our present is Russian; our future is American." That future is almost
here — with foreign investment beginning to feel secure, with Vietnamese
exiles in France and the U.S. returning to establish businesses, ...

Whether this progress continues will depend, of course, on whether the Hanoi
government continues to liberalize. Western investors need the security of the
rule of law, especially contract and property law, if they are to remain for
the long haul.
But the signs are promising. And if that happens, then the North's victory in
1975 will have achieved little more than postpone the rise of another
capitalist "Asian Tiger" by about 25 years.

What of the significance of Vietnam as a local skirmish in the Cold War? Here
we have the testimony of Asia's principal elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, First
minister of Singapore. He has pointed out that the American intervention in the
war halted the onward march of Communism southwards for 15 years — roughly
from 1960 to 1975. In that crucial period, the new ex-colonial states of
Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, maybe India itself, took advantage of this
incidental American protection to develop their economies from poor
agricultural and trading post economies into modern industrial and information
societies. By the time the war was over and North Vietnamese tanks were surging
into Saigon, these countries were prosperous NICs (i.e. newly industrializing
countries), more or less immune to the Communist virus and capable of resisting
external attack.

Nor does the story end with the safety of Singapore. In the late 1980s, when
the Soviet politburo was debating perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev cited its
success — tiny Singapore, exported more in value than the vast Soviet Union
— as demonstrating the need to dismantle the socialist command economy. (At
the exact same moment, Hanoi was embarking on its own hesitant liberalization.
Coincidence?)

If Lee Kuan Yew is to be believed, then, the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was a
major factor is achieving the West's overall victory in the Cold War. It held
the line while freedom and prosperity were established in non-Communist Asia
— and that provided the rest of the world, including the evil empire itself,
with a "demonstration effect" of how freedom led to prosperity. ...


Chris Mark