Back to Vietnam

With the State Department's announcement this year of a new "road map" for eventual normalization of relations with the communist government in Hanoi, the Bush administration appears to be inching slowly, if reluctantly, toward the formulation of a new U.S. policy toward Vietnam. The new approach attempts to look forward rather than back. More than 16 years after the fall of Saigon, such change is long overdue.

Since the end of the war in Indochina, U.S. policy toward Vietnam has been guided mainly by hostility and lingering resentment. The United States has had no diplomatic relations with Vietnam despite the fact that the communist government would appear to have met any suggested criteria for qualifying as the de facto rulers of a legitimate nation-state. Instead the United States lists Vietnam as one of a handful of "enemy" countries, along with Cuba and North Korea, that are barred from receiving American aid, investments, exports or credit.

The Bush administration also has followed the lead of its predecessors in blocking Vietnam's attempts to receive international assistance from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, although for most economists Hanoi's monetary reforms appear to meet IMF preconditions to receive lending.

The stated reason for this continued policy of hostility is Cambodia; on Christmas Day, 1978, Vietnam invaded its small neighbor, toppled the murderous regime of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and installed in its place a more pliant communist regime of pro-Vietnamese Cambodian defectors. The rationale for the American policy was strategic-that is, just weeks before the invasion, all senior Vietnamese leaders traveled to Moscow to sign a 15-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union, giving the Kremlin a new foothold in the Southeast Asian mainland and turning Vietnam, in the prevailing view of the time, into a new Soviet "satellite" that threatened regional stability.