U.S.-Vietnam forge unclear ties

Change for the better was meant to be in the air at the White House last week, as President Clinton moved to normalize relations with Vietnam. Our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin read all the speeches and concluded that change was more apparent than real.

HONG KONG (JP): Fifty four years after the U.S. first focused on the realpolitik of Indochina, the Americans are still groping to place Vietnam in proper perspective. Domestic U.S. politics still clouds their vision. President Bill Clinton seeks to "put the past behind us".

But in doing so, his motivation is remarkably similar to that of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as they escalated the war which many Americans would now like to forget.

So recent events were not quite as they appeared to be. On the surface, on Tuesday July 11, 1995 the U.S. and Vietnam "normalized" diplomatic relations. In the sense that the two nations accorded each other full diplomatic recognition, and upgraded their respective liaison offices to full embassies, this was true.

But a larger truth quickly became apparent. Beneath the surface, the United States merely took one more major step on the tortuous -- and not yet completed -- path towards normalizing relations within itself, over its involvement with Vietnam.

That political involvement really began in 1940-1941 as Japan's attempted conquest of China spilled over into what was then French Indochina. For 10 years from 1931, the Americans had watched Japanese aggression expand in China, without doing anything very much to stop it.

The Japanese occupation of southern Indochina finally awoke Washington to the basic fact that there was no appeasing the aggressor. An oil embargo was placed on Japan in July 1941, after it refused to withdraw from Vietnam. This move is generally credited with helping push the Japanese militarists towards their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

During World War II, agents from the U.S. forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), lived up to the name of their organization when they worked with Ho Chi Minh and his communist guerrillas as they fought together against the Japanese.

The crucial moment came almost 50 years ago. The OSS agents urged Washington to support Ho Chi Minh after he issued his August 1945 Declaration of Independence. If President Franklin Roosevelt, with his strong anti-colonial disposition, had still been alive, Ho and the OSS might have got a better hearing. U.S.- Vietnam ties might have been "normalized" there and then.

New in office, President Harry Truman was faced with the first indications of what was to become the Cold War. U.S. policy was primarily Euro-centric, as it often continues to be. So the U.S. supported France in its attempted reconquest of its colonial possession. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history.

Gradually, through the 1960s and early 1970s, Vietnam assumed a size and importance in American thinking out of all proportion to its strategic significance. The process of shrinking that size continues, while that of seeing Vietnam's real relevance has hardly begun. The U.S., as ever, is in danger of oscillating between extremes, from over-involvement to under-involvement.

All this became very clear during the "normalization" ceremonies last week.

First, the announcement by President Bill Clinton was made in the White House when all good Vietnamese were asleep. It was around 2 a.m. Vietnam time.

Second, if there were any Vietnamese at the White House, they certainly were not visible to the cameras of U.S. network television. Certainly there were none among the politicians surrounding the President.

Third, there was no joint statement or communique, setting the stage for a new era in what has been a vexed relationship. According to Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Winston Lord, some formal documents may be exchanged between the two countries in early August when Secretary of State Warren Christopher becomes the first Secretary of State to visit Hanoi. But that seemed very much an afterthought.

All this was in marked contrast to the way in which Sino- American relations were normalized in 1978. Statements were issued at exactly the same time in both capitals, there was a joint communique of course, and Deng Xiaoping's upcoming visit to the U.S. was announced.

But then, of course, two Middle Kingdom complexes were then at work, each demanding due status and proper attention from the other.

One consisted of the inward-looking impulses, and disdain for the outside world, to be frequently found "inside the Beltway" surrounding Washington DC. The other better-known Middle Kingdom complex stemmed from the Sinocentric impulses and the lordly disdain for all foreigners still widespread "inside the Great Wall of China".

As U.S.-Vietnam ties were normalized, the American Middle Kingdom complex was still very much in evidence. But the Vietnamese, like every other Southeast Asian nation, have long since learnt that a Middle Kingdom complex is a luxury they simply cannot afford.

To be sure, amid the hubris of victory in the Second Vietnam War in 1975, the Vietnamese did make the understandable but nevertheless foolish demand that the Americans pay reparations for their defeat. That demand was dropped long ago, as the Vietnamese waited for the American Middle Kingdom complex to work through its numerous Vietnam hang-ups.

So, fourth, no wider imagination -- a chronic deficiency in the American encounter with Vietnam -- went into last Tuesday's ceremonies. A 9:00 a.m. ceremony in the White House could have been jointly broadcast, via satellite, with a ceremony in Vietnam at 8:00 p.m. Instead, Vietnamese Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet made a telecast all by himself to Vietnam some eight hours after Clinton made his announcement to Americans.

Fifth, once Kiet got around to reading Clinton's speech, he was probably very glad that no imagination had been displayed regarding a joint telecast. In his speech, Clinton gave some superb examples of the American tendency to be self-centered -- which would have been embarrassing to the Vietnamese.

As in all the administration's "fact-sheets" (no less than four were issued) and presentations, the obsession with Americans missing-in-action held sway. Clinton devoted roughly two-thirds of his speech to that one topic. Dutifully, Assistant Secretary Lord made past and future Vietnamese help over the missing-in- action into the strategic rationale for normalization.

"Never before in the history of warfare has such an extensive effort been made to resolve the fate of soldiers who did not return," Clinton said. The Vietnamese had responded to pressure on this issue, so normalization was appropriate, as a means to bring more pressure. "Vietnam has pledged it will continue to help us find answers. We will hold them to that pledge."

Entirely lost to view was any simple thanks for Vietnamese efforts -- such as when they recently permitted the Americans to vainly dig up a Vietnamese cemetery in a search for U.S. remains.

Clinton, the former war protester, could not bring himself to pledge reverse sympathy and help for the 200,000 or more Vietnamese missing-in-action still unaccounted for.

More than that, there were moments when Clinton seemed to be trying to retrospectively snatch victory from the memory of American defeat.

"By helping to bring Vietnam into the community of nations", Clinton said patronizingly, "normalization also serves our interest in working for a free and peaceful Vietnam in a stable and peaceful Asia...I believe normalization and increased contact between Americans and Vietnamese will advance the cause of freedom in Vietnam, just as it did in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union".

All told, it was a graceless speech -- a reminder that many of the passionate protesters against the Vietnam War, of whom Clinton was one, were more concerned with themselves and America than with Vietnam. Presumably Clinton's speechwriter had never heard that the collapse of the Soviet Union was traumatic for Vietnam -- so why rub salt in an old wound?

One can only wonder whether the reported late-night meeting of the Vietnamese politburo in Hanoi on July 10 was in any way a reaction to the speech -- with moderates as well as hard-liners angry or irritated by the American sentiments? If so, the Vietnamese had the good sense not to let their anger show.

Of course, a sixth reason in last week's ceremonies was that, in the final analysis, they had nothing to do with Vietnam, and everything to do with U.S. domestic politics.

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson over-extended U.S. involvement in Vietnam basically because they were politically fearful of being seen as "soft on communism".

As President Clinton mentioned the Americans who died for freedom in Vietnam without ever mentioning the millions of Vietnamese who believed they were sacrificing for the same cause, as he stressed that he was still being tough over the missing-in- action issue, and as he concluded his speech one-sidedly and self-centredly with the phrase "God Bless America", he clearly showed signs of being politically fearful in exactly the same way.

That is why U.S.-Vietnamese relations, and U.S. relations with itself over Vietnam, are both not yet normalized.