Americans are still learning the wrong lessons from Vietnam

Most American presidents have learned the wrong lessons from the American War in Vietnam, as it is called there. The most recent presidential misstep is Donald Trump’s attempt to prevent U.S. diplomats in Vietnam from participating in that country’s events on April 30 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. The United States should be doing all it can to engage with Vietnam, taking the interests of both countries into account, but all too often the U.S. has pursued only its own mistaken agenda, in that country and elsewhere, with devastating human consequences.

The first and most basic mistake was the American refusal to let the Vietnamese determine their own political reality. The French colonized Vietnam, along with Laos and Cambodia, and multiple American presidents, from Woodrow Wilson in 1919 to Harry Truman in 1945 to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954, sided with the French. This was despite the efforts of Ho Chi Minh to couch his requests for American recognition using the language of freedom and independence, including a comparison of the Vietnamese revolution to the American Revolution.

Not all the Vietnamese agreed with Ho, but it was his Viet Minh forces who defeated the French in 1954. The U.S. then took over the French colonial mission and prevented the reunifying of the north and south. Southeast Asia was seen as a focal point of the Cold War, a region that needed American paternal guidance rather than self-determination. As then-Sen. John F. Kennedy said of Vietnam in 1957, “This is our offspring, ... and if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence — communism, political anarchy, poverty and the rest — then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible, and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.”

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Kennedy committed increasing numbers of U.S. military personnel in Vietnam in the early 1960s. President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated that involvement to over half a million troops by the late 1960s. He was prescient about the political costs of the war: “If I left the woman I really loved — the Great Society — in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home.” Johnson declined to run for reelection, and Richard Nixon won, promising the “Vietnamization” of the war, as if it were not the case already.

While it is understandable that Americans focus on their own dead in Vietnam, that ethnocentric and nationalist preoccupation represents a reckless disregard for reality. In 1977, Jimmy Carter, about as liberal a president as any ever in the White House, said of the war that “the destruction was mutual.” If mutual implies a kind of symmetry, this is factually untrue.

In the 1960s, the U.S. suffered a kind of civil war of the American soul whereby the conflict between pro-war and antiwar factions mixed with other ruptures around race, class, gender and more, ruptures that have continued to this day in the culture wars. These conflicts may make Americans feel that they paid a heavy price for the Vietnam War, a price in addition to the more than 58,000 Americans who died.

But 3 million Vietnamese died on all sides. Hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians died. And another 1.7 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge genocide, a direct consequence of the war. Add the unknown numbers that died in re-education camps, and the tens of thousands that died as refugees. Thousands more died from land mines and unexploded ordnance left behind. And the effects of Agent Orange are still manifest today in illness and birth defects.

To avoid having to truly confront the staggering asymmetry of the Vietnam War, Americans might prefer to believe Carter when he said, “We went to Vietnam without any desire to … impose American will on other people,” or President Obama when he said that the war was “a story of Americans … patriots who braved the line of fire, who cast themselves into harm’s way to save a friend, who fought hour after hour, day after day to preserve the liberties we hold dear.”

Focusing on the sacrifices of soldiers is the way Americans refuse to consider the true cost of Vietnam. Others see the cost mostly as a loss of power and confidence that took years to restore. As President George H.W. Bush put it in 1991, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” by which he meant that the success of Operation Desert Storm would allow the U.S. to engage again in military adventures that its failure in Vietnam had forestalled. This, unfortunately, is the corollary: American wars can be fought ever better, with fewer American casualties, ever greater American global dominance and less reporting of the damage done to non-Americans.

Instead, our presidents should have learned not to interfere with wars of liberation and independence, not to invade Iraq or Afghanistan, not to support authoritarian governments and not to send bombs, weapons or aid to Israel in its war in Gaza, which in the eyes of Palestinians, many Americans and much of the rest of the world, is a genocide.

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The argument that the war in Southeast Asia was a noble but flawed effort, a failure of American innocence, was satirized by Graham Greene in his 1957 novel “The Quiet American.” Greene’s titular character, an idealistic CIA agent, believes he is in Vietnam doing good. When his actions lead to a bombing that kills civilians, Alden Pyle says, “It was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause. . . . In a way you could say they died for democracy.” The cynical British journalist who has befriended Pyle reflects on how “innocent” Americans had conquered the Philippines, Hawaii, New Mexico and Puerto Rico, and concludes that “innocence is a kind of insanity.”

And here President Trump enters the scene, not as the Quiet American like his predecessors but as an Ugly American.

For all his coarseness, Trump does sometimes expose the hypocrisy and pretensions of others, even if he is unaware of his own. Referring to his own refusal to go to war, he reportedly said, “You think I’m stupid; I wasn’t going to Vietnam,” which at least is more direct than the draft deferral of Bill Clinton, and many more like him, who apparently was also not stupid enough to go but was discreet enough not to say it in such a fashion.

Trump also called dead American soldiers of previous wars “suckers” and “losers.” People were shocked, but plenty of veterans were disillusioned by Vietnam and other wars. They felt their comrades died for nothing, or died heeding the call to defend freedom and democracy only to realize that “war is a racket” for corporate interests and American power, as retired Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler put it after reflecting on his military service in Haiti, Cuba, Mexico and Central America.

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It is for those corporate interests and for American power that since April 30, 1975, presidents have rebuilt relations with Vietnam. The ultimate irony is that the victorious Vietnamese and the defeated Americans both got what they wanted. For the Vietnamese victors, if not the ones who lost, Vietnam is a free and independent nation, albeit one that represses the political opinions of its citizens. For Americans, Vietnam is a capitalist economy open for business, and a tentative ally against China. Had the U.S. simply let the Vietnamese determine their own future, the outcome would have likely been the same, minus the millions of dead.

American interventions haunt the United States. President Reagan saw Central America as the next front of the Cold War after Southeast Asia. He threw his support behind authoritarian regimes including the one in El Salvador, whose U.S.-trained military fought a brutal civil war that killed thousands and displaced thousands more, many of whom fled to the United States. Some became gangsters and were deported back home, where they terrorized their fellow Salvadorans, creating the excuse for President Nayib Bukele’s terrifying CECOT prison, where the United States is now sending people without due process.

So it is that we are caught up in the blowback from the past. In Vietnam, the United States has done the bare minimum to redress the war’s ongoing effects: helping in the search for missing Vietnamese soldiers, paying some of the costs of remediating dioxin-affected land, removing unexploded ordnance. Trump’s policies imperil even these efforts. His ruinous tariffs and his impulse to ignore the 50th anniversary of the war’s end smack of pettiness and bad diplomacy. Or it could be that he simply shares in the delusion, the sense, when it comes to the United States, of being perpetually innocent.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016, came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. His latest book is “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.” He teaches at USC.