Conflicts over ideologies, and specifically the Left-Right dichotomy, generally serve to: (1) Obscure the facts and especially the causes of issues because of entrenched dogma; (2) Make enemies out of groups and individuals who perhaps have more in common than this dichotomy permits them to realize.
In the case of Vietnam, and specifically the civil war between the North and South, the Left-Right dichotomy was of course in full play. The Left in the West, and particularly in the USA, adopted its standard position of opposing whatever policy the USA pursued, while the Right persisted in its standard position of “my country, right or wrong.” These days, with the wars against the “axis of evil”, the Right, by which I mean in the American context the “palaeoconseratives”, as distinct from the Trotskyist-derived “neoconservatives,” has reverted to the traditional “America First” position that has been out of favor in US policy circles since at least the time of Woodrow Wilson.
Rice fields in northern Vietnam (Tran Thi Hoa / World Bank)
Getting above and beyond a Left-versus-Right dichotomy, I suggest the new dichotomy should be that of national-cultural-identities versus globalization. In this context, many states and doctrines regarded with anathema by conservative-minded folk would be seen in another perspective. As deplorable as the North Korean regime seems to be, for example (and can we necessarily trust corporate media and US governmental attitudes towards that regime?), they are not just a bunch of commies. The governing doctrine is called Jucha, which basically means “national self-sufficiency”, and is post-Marxian and specifically anti-globalist.[1] Similarly, Gadaffi’s “Third Universal Theory” is a form of “Arab socialism”, that is about as far removed from Marxism as it is possible to go, while also rejecting capitalism; hence its being a “third theory.”[2] One might ask: are these regimes both listed as among the “axis of evil” in this new “Cold War” era because, like numerous other states, they are considered anachronisms in a “new world order” that must be predicated on a “one model fits all” doctrine, politically, economically and culturally?[3]
Vietnam’s Historic Struggle for Freedom
In the case of the Vietnamese, their struggle has been several thousand years old, and there are indications that they have finally succumbed to a foreign authority far more corrosive to sovereignty than any conventional imperial military power.
China’s imperial ambitions towards Vietnam go back to 208 BC when a Chinese general, Trieu Da, proclaimed himself emperor of much of the country. In 111 BC, Vietnam was annexed by the Han and became the district of Giao-chi. After centuries of resistance, some measure of independence was achieved, but Vietnam continued to pay tribute to China. The Mongols were successfully repelled during the 12th century, the Vietnamese being the only people to do so, attesting to their tenacity. The Chinese occupied the country in 1407. Liberation was accomplished in 1428 after two decades of further resistance. China attacked in 1788, but was repelled.
In 1909, China tried to claim the Paracel islands, the start of a series of aggressive moves that continue to the present. In 1956, the Chinese navy took part of the Paracels, with a further invasion in 1974. In 1984, China set up the Hainan administrative area to control the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos. In 1988, Chinese and Vietnamese ships clashed over Johnson Reef. In 1992, there were further incursions into Spratly. The Chinese entered into a contract with the U.S. Crestone Energy Corp. in 1994 for the exploration of oil around Spratly. In 2000, Vietnam made concessions to China over the territorial waters off Tonkin Bay. During 2004, there were over 1000 Chinese incursions into Vietnamese waters, with 80 Vietnamese fishermen being detained in December. There was Chinese oil drilling in Vietnamese waters in 2005, and in that year the Chinese navy fired at Vietnamese fishermen in Vietnamese waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. In 2007, the Chinese fired on Vietnamese fishermen off the Paracels. The Chinese navy conducted exercises in the area. The Chinese Government ratified a plan to build Sansha, a large city to serve as the axis for merging three archipelagos, including the Paracels and Spratly, under Chinese control.[4]
In 1979, Vietnam became a victim of Sino-Soviet rivalry, when China invaded “as a grand gesture for the repudiation of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, which was due for renewal.”[5] Clause 6 of the Treaty stated that if neither signatory announced their intention to terminate the treaty during its final year, the alliance would automatically be extended for another five years.[6]
The so-called Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty was designed not to secure superpower status for China on the coattails of the USSR, as Mao intended, nor even as a friendly alignment between two supposedly fraternal Communist states, but to maintain a position of subjugation and outright humiliation. The Chinese regarded the Treaty as maintaining Russian “hegemony.” It came from the days when Stalin was imposing terms on a Maoist state that he never regarded in a comradely manner.[7]
China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979 was therefore intended as a direct provocation to the USSR, which had signed a defense treaty with Vietnam in 1978, itself aimed at China. This Soviet-Vietnamese alliance made Vietnam the “linchpin” in the USSR’s “drive to contain China.”[8]
The rift between China and Vietnam became apparent when thousands of ethnic Chinese began to flee Vietnam during 1978. Territorial disputes over the Spratly Islands, and Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia, increased Sino-Vietnamese tensions.
Bruce Elleman states that far from China having faced a defeat in Vietnam because of its quick withdrawal, the invasion was aimed at defying the USSR, which had signed a defense treaty with Vietnam, showing the Russians up as so-called “paper polar bears”; thereby repudiating the Russo-Chinese supposed accord which had been nothing but an encumbrance and was due for renewal at precisely the time of the invasion.
China announced its intention to invade Vietnam on February 15, 1979, the very first day that it could legally terminate the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty, and it attacked three days later. When Moscow did not intervene, Beijing publicly proclaimed that the USSR had broken its numerous promises to assist Vietnam. The USSR’s failure to support Vietnam emboldened China to announce on April 3, 1979 that it intended to terminate the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance.
…After only three weeks of fighting, China withdrew and disputes over the Sino-Vietnamese border remained unresolved. To most outsiders, China’s military action thus appeared to be a failure. But, if the real goal behind China’s attack was to expose Soviet assurances of military support to Vietnam as a fraud, then the USSR’s refusal to intervene effectively terminated the Soviet-Vietnamese defense treaty. Thus, Beijing did achieve a clear strategic victory by breaking the Soviet encirclement and by eliminating Moscow’s threat of a two-front war.[9]
China threatened Russia with war if Russia went to Vietnam’s aid. Meanwhile, the Chinese had developed an alliance with the USA, which threatened the USSR on two fronts.
To prevent Soviet intervention on Vietnam’s behalf, Deng warned Moscow the next day that China was prepared for a full-scale war against the USSR; in preparation for this conflict, China put all of her troops along the Sino-Soviet border on an emergency war alert, set up a new military command in Xinjiang, and even evacuated an estimated 300,000 civilians from the Sino-Soviet border. [10]
China had witnessed a lack of will on the part of Russia, buttressed by the Politburo’s failure to act in Poland against Solidarity. [11]
French Colonialism and U.S. Neo-Colonialism
After a series of French military incursions between 1859 and 1885, Vietnam was brought into French Indo-China. The beginning of the collapse of French Indo-China, and indeed of European imperial powers in general, was set in motion by World War II. In 1941, the Japanese invaded Vietnam. The war against the Japanese accorded Ho Chi Minh the opportunity to take Hanoi. From 1946 to 1954 the French and Ho’s forces engaged and North and South Vietnam were established in the Geneva Accord in 1954, with the French position eliminated.
It would be naïve to believe that the USA pursued a friendly attitude towards its World War II Allies in regard to the future of the European empires after the war. The USA was just as committed to destroying the European empires as was the USSR, as both sought to fill the vacuum. It is evident from Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) historian Peter Grosse’s comments that the oligarchs rivaled the USSR as the patrons of anti-colonialism. Grosse writes:
Indochina was seen as a French colonial problem; the consensus of the wartime studies was that France could never expect to return to its Southeast Asian colonies in force, and the region would necessarily become a geopolitical concern of the United States as the emerging Pacific power.[12]
Grosse mentions that the leader of the communist/nationalist insurgents against French rule in Indo-China, Ho Chi Minh, had been met by members of “The Inquiry”[13] in their capacity as President Wilson’s advisers at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. Grosse writes:
After the Korean War ended in 1953, the Council returned to a serious examination of Indochina, where France’s restored colonial regime was clashing with the guerrilla forces of a self-described Marxist revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh, whom members of the Inquiry had first encountered as one of the obscure nationality plaintiffs at the Paris Peace Conference more than three decades earlier.[14]
In November 1953 a CFR study group released its first report on Indo-China stating that the Viet Minh rebellion did not represent a communist threat. The report stated of the rebellion against the French in Indo-China:
The war was “far larger than anything” the policy thinkers supposed…. It was wrong to see Ho’s Vietminh forces as simply a forward guard of world communism; nothing in Moscow’s designs could explain the size and violence of the Vietnamese rebels. Marxism “has little to do with the current revolution,” rather, it was pent-up nationalism, pure and simple. With France discredited by its colonial past, the opportunity was opening for the United States to guide Ho’s revolutionaries away from their irrelevant Marxist rhetoric.[15]
Although Grosse does not suggest anything of the type, it is tempting to theorize that Ho had been spotted as far back as 1919, among other colonial revolutionists at the Paris Peace Conference, and kept in mind for future cultivation, as per the dialectical, long-range strategy of the oligarchs.[16] That dialectical long range-strategy might not have consisted of anything more than allowing Ho to achieve power in the entirety of Vietnam over the course of pursuing several decades of what many military professionals and conservatives at the time referred to as a “no win war” in Vietnam.[17]
While such American conservatives view the “no win war” in Vietnam as the result of communist subversion of the USA for the purposes of destroying America’s military, morale and economy; it is my theory that a “no win” policy was pursued to allow the communists (nationalists) to take Vietnam in its entirety to form a unified state, such a prolonged “no-win” war having so drained the new nation that Vietnam would be obliged to seek credit and economic development via international finance.
Hence, Vietnam would go like most of the other decolonized states: from European colonial status to the neo-colonialism of international finance and the transnational corporations. If this dialectical theory sounds too far-fetched or “conspiratorial” perhaps it might be considered that a war-weary Europe was colonized precisely in such a manner via the Marshall Plan, which was the reason “aid” was rejected by the Soviet bloc; the USSR seeing this as the means by which Europe would be subjugated by U.S.-based global capital.
Whatever the motives, the outcome was the elimination of France from Indo-China, and despite the revolutionary rhetoric of the Viet Minh, what in recent years seems to be the inexorable entry of Vietnam into the world economy.
Vietnam’s Path to Globalization and Market Economy
Is the above mere conjecture? It is indeed a fact that: (1) Vietnam having once been a primarily agricultural country, had its agricultural foundations wrecked by the prolonged war, and (2) Vietnam, having been so exhausted, has sought relief in market economics and debt finance.
Vietnam would not have been the first country to be plunged into war for the primary reason of imposing a “market economy.” One of the primary peace demands against Serbia by the NATO forces was that a “market economy” be enacted in place of state planning, especially in regard to the mineral rich region of Kosvo. And of course the Soros/National Endowment for Democracy “color revolutions” have wrought havoc on much of the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere in toppling regimes and inaugurating those in support of an “open society” – i.e., open to exploitation by international capital.
Hence, at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam in December 1986, reformers led by Nguyen Van Linh achieved a palace coup and embarked on a course of free-market reforms called Đổi Mới (renovation), establishing a so-called “socialist-oriented market economy.”[18] While this might be seen as akin to Lenin’s “New Economy Policy” in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, the USSR might easily have embarked on a course of plutocratic colonization had Trotsky assumed power rather than Stalin, and of course the USSR did eventually succumb.
Perhaps the easiest way of gauging the degree to which a state has been subjugated by international capital is to consider reports from entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The World Bank states of Vietnam:
…During this period, the World Bank Group’s relationship with Vietnam has also matured and grown considerably. The Country Partnership Strategy for FY07-FY11 supports the Government’s Socio-Economic Development Plan 2006-2010, which lays out a path of transition towards a market economy with socialist orientation, with the goal of attaining middle income country status by 2010.[19]
“A market economy with socialist orientation” is the dialectical synthesis that the oligarchy considers the most desirable form of economy. The World Bank states that:
Vietnam has become increasingly integrated with the world economy and has become a member of the World Trade Organization…. Recent growth is driven by the rising importance of the private sector. The role of the state sector in manufacturing activity has declined appreciably: from 52 percent in 1995 to under 35 percent in 2006… Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) commitments almost doubled, to $20.3 billion, whereas stock market capitalization reached 43 percent of GDP by end 2007, compared to 1.5 percent two years earlier. The level of public debt, at 42 percent of GDP, is moderate and is considered to be sustainable. The indebtedness is similar to other ASEAN countries. The baseline scenario of the most recent Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is broadly in line with the investment and growth outlook of the SEDP. It estimates public and publicly-guaranteed debt to increase from 44 percent of the GDP in 2007 to around 51 percent by 2016, and decline slightly thereafter. This increase, though significant, is still considered within manageable limits, especially since more than half of it will remain on highly concessional terms.[20]
While the World Bank overview on Vietnam is enthusiastic as to the privatization of the economy, and the rise of the public debt to over half the GDP, it is a very graphic example of how a supposedly socialist state was quickly integrated into the world economic system, after having been devastated by decades of “no-win war.”
[1] Kim Jong Il, On some Questions in Understanding the Juche Philosophy (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1984); Kim Jong Il, On the Juche Idea (1989).
[2] A E Murad, The Third Universal Theory: Echoes in the West (Ontario: Jerusalem International Publishing House, 1984).
[3] While such questions will be unpalatable conservative types; those who lean towards the Left will not like it suggested that other peoples considered anachronistic in this era of globalization include the Afrikaners who had spent most of their existence fighting some type of plutocracy, while the post-apartheid regime delivered South Africa to privatisation, including the selling off of the “parastatals,” which the ANC assured its supporters is “correct Marxist-Leninist policy.”
[4] K R Bolton, “Russia and China: an Approaching Conflict?,” The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, Washington, Summer 2009, Vol. 34, No. 2, 164-165.
[5] Ibid., 162.
[6] Ibid.
[7] K R Bolton, “Sino-Soviet-US Relations and the 1969 Nuclear Threat,” Foreign Policy Journal, May 17, 2010. K R Bolton, op.cit., 2009, 156-158.
[8] Robert A Scalapino., “The Political Influence of the USSR in Asia,” in Donald S. Zagoria, ed., Soviet Policy in East Asia (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982), 71.
[9] Bruce Elleman, “Sino-Soviet Relations and the February 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Conflict,” 20 April 1996
<http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/vietnamcenter/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/elleviet.htm>
Vietnam Center, Texas Tech University, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/vietnamcenter/
[10] Elleman, ibid.
[11] Elleman, ibid.
[12] Peter Grosse, “The First Transformation,” Continuing The Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996, (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006). The entire book can be read online at: Council on Foreign Relations: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/index.html
[13] “The Inquiry” was the predecessor of the Council on Foreign Relations, which Grosse refers to as the USA’s “foreign policy establishment.” (sic).
[14] Peter Grosse, op.cit.
[15] Ibid.
[16] K R Bolton, “Socialism, Revolution, and Capitalist Dialectics,” Foreign Policy Journal, May 4, 2010.
[17] For example: Maj. Arch E Roberts, Victory Denied: Why Your Son Faces Death in ‘No-Win Wars’” (Colorado: Committee to Restore the Constitution, 1972).
[18] Geoffrey Murray, (1997) Vietnam: Dawn of a New Market (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 24-25.
[19] The World Bank: “Vietnam: Country Brief”, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/VIETNAMEXTN/0,,contentMDK:20212080~menuPK:387573~pagePK:1497618~piPK:217854~theSitePK:387565,00.html (Accessed 28 February 2010).
[20] Ibid.
