Trump can boycott, but the failure and end of Vietnam War is a fact

The Trump administration has ordered U.S. diplomats in Vietnam not to attend ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War on Wednesday, according to a report in the New York Times.

Although mere ceremonies that look backward in history may seem unimportant compared to the current problems that diplomats must address, this decision to shun official representation at events that the Vietnamese government is organizing is regrettable. It represents a failure to recognize one of the greatest transitions in U.S. foreign policy from a destructive to a constructive path.

No better example of the opposite of a policy of restraint can be found than the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The costs of the war to the United States were so great and varied as to be, in many respects, incalculable. Those costs included more than 58,000 American deaths and over 300,000 wounded. Estimates of the monetary costs vary but are around a third of a trillion dollars.

The economic disruptions from the war had lingering ill effects for years, including contributing to the stagflation of the 1970s. Not least important, the war fractured American society and fed increased distrust of government.

Direct U.S. involvement in the war ended with the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops in March 1973, 60 days after the signing of the peace agreement that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho negotiated. The South Vietnamese regime collapsed two years later. The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 to forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam — the North Vietnamese regime — marked the end of the fighting and is the date whose anniversary is being observed this month.

In the five decades since, the United States and Vietnam forged a warm, multifaceted relationship. Diplomatic relations were normalized in 1995. In the words of a State Department fact sheet published this January, “U.S.-Vietnam relations have become increasingly cooperative and comprehensive, evolving into a flourishing partnership that spans political, economic, security, and people-to-people ties.” Bilateral trade grew from $451 million in 1995 to nearly $124 billion in 2023.

In 2023, during a visit to Vietnam by President Joe Biden, the two nations declared a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that extends to defense and security matters. A key shared interest underlying such cooperation is to limit the expanding influence and power of China.

This later history has demonstrated how badly wrong the major assumptions underlying the U.S. decision to go to war in Vietnam were. The military adversary there was not, as was assumed, part of a communist monolith led by Moscow and Beijing. The subsequent history has shown how the United States can have a mutually beneficial relationship even with a regime that still avows an ideology foreign to America’s own.

The 50th anniversary this week marks not just a victory of North Vietnam over the South. More fundamentally — and more importantly for the United States — it marks the end of an extremely costly misdirection of U.S. foreign policy and a clearing of the way to embark on a peaceful, profitable, and mutually beneficial relationship between the United States and Vietnam. That is worth observing, for reasons that go well beyond respect for the host country.

Much effort by multiple U.S. administrations, of both parties, has gone into building that beneficial relationship. Now, under the current administration, that work risks being undone. The demolition of programs administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development has halted U.S.-funded efforts to undo some of the damage left over from the war, involving such things as finding unexploded munitions and the remains of missing soldiers, and cleaning up areas contaminated by the Agent Orange defoliant.

President Trump’s trade war has threatened Vietnam with a 46% tariff — one of the highest of the so-called “reciprocal” tariffs to be directed at any country — even though the tariffs that Vietnam actually applies to U.S. exports are well below that. How much tariff-related damage will yet occur is uncertain as of this writing and depends on further negotiations.

Now, the administration appears ready to add insult to injury with a boycott of the end-of-war anniversary observances. The Times report speculates that one possible motivation for this posture is not wanting to detract from the 100-day mark of Trump’s second term. Another is not wanting to draw any attention to a war that Trump avoided thanks to bone spurs while hundreds of thousands of his contemporaries were being drafted into military service.

Perhaps a more fundamental reason is Trump’s tendency to view nearly everything in zero-sum terms, with a winner and a loser. From that viewpoint, what happened 50 years ago was nothing more than a win by North Vietnam and a loss by the U.S. client South Vietnam. But the world, and international relations, are by no means zero-sum. This certainly is true of relations between the United States and Vietnam, as the subsequent half century of history has demonstrated.

As a U.S. Army officer in Vietnam in 1972-1973, I was involved in administering the final phases of the U.S. troop withdrawal. Because of having to process everyone out first, I returned to the United States on the last plane of that final withdrawal in March 1973. Being the very end of the U.S. part of the war, there were ceremonial aspects, including a red-carpet welcome when our plane landed in California. I participated in a ceremony de-activating my unit, the 90th Replacement Battalion, which had seen service in several other conflicts beginning with World War I.

I expressed to a reporter covering the event my hope that the unit would never need to be activated again.

The ceremonies provided a sense of closure that so many others who had served in Vietnam, and who returned unappreciated to a divided country, were not as fortunate as I was to have. Now, in a nation that seems at least as bitterly divided as ever, a little bit of ceremony, recognizing a past transition from a tragic phase of U.S. foreign relations to a more beneficial phase, might do the nation some similar good.