After reading this week’s passages, it became very clear to me that there truly wasn’t a winner in the Vietnam War. The Americans see it as a blemish upon their history because they couldn’t decisively get the victory that they wanted, but the Vietnamese people have not gotten the life that they thought independence would bring them either. This seems very sad to me that after both countries faced such resistance and lost so many lives that no one has become better for it. The readings extensively covered post-war Vietnam from 1975 until the present and painted a pretty bleak picture of everyday life there.
Gabriel Kolko said in Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace,
“The entire historical experience…has repeatedly confirmed that a nation ultimately cannot truly win a war unless it is able to utilize that period that follows it to attain the goals for which it struggled and sacrificed so much.” (p. 160)
The communist party gained the control that it so desperately fought
It’s disappointing to see that a country that had fought for so long against so many foreign impositions cannot thrive once it gains its independence. I think there are too many unresolved issues that are in opposition to each other that need to be worked on in order for Vietnam to really find its national identity. It needs to decide whether it can survive as a communist nation or try to ally itself with the western nations and learn from a free market society. It can’t live in limbo between the two. It’s clear from the readings that Vietnam has the potential to be a great nation and economic power, if it could just find the right leadership to take it in a new direction.
Currently, the situation has improved, but mainly because of the steps the government has taken away from its Communist roots. They are slowly moving towards establishing relations not only with their other Southeast Asian neighbors by joining the ASEAN, but also have worked on their relations with China
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