The 1997 appointment and confirmation of Ambas-sador Douglas P. “Pete” Peterson has helped to clear the air. A former prisoner of war himself, Peterson, like other prominent veterans such as John McCain, brought undeniable credentials in the MIA and Viet Kieu communities. Ambassador Peterson came to Hanoi with an explicitly trade-centered agenda. Rather than provide large amounts of direct assistance, which would be difficult to clear through vocal domestic constituencies, the US would invest its way out of history and bring prosperity to Vietnam. The Vietnamese would then possess the resources to resolve their own problems, including the lingering effects of war.
This new approach appeared to resonate well with the Hanoi government’s own priorities. Nevertheless, the path to normal trade relations laid out by the US involved a series of steps and obstacles to be overcome, all on the Vietnamese side. The bilateral debt agreement signed by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in 1997 was particularly hard for Hanoi to swallow, as it involved payback of war debts incurred by their former adversaries in Saigon. Rubin told his Vietnamese counterparts that debt repayment removed one of the most significant barriers to normal relations, explicitly linking it to wartime issues. “The signal sent by this agreement,” he said, “will be important to the rest of the world in building confidence in Vietnam in a way that will benefit its economy. With Vietnam’s continued cooperation in accounting for American POWs and MIAs, we look forward to working with Vietnam as it continues to make progress toward structural reforms, a market-based economy and regional and global economic integration.” Cooperation could therefore only exist on a limited agenda predetermined by the US, towards goals outlined in advance: structural adjustment and globalization on US terms.
Even with favorable terms on debt and Vietnam’s cooperation with the POW-MIA program, it still took a year of careful bargaining in the US before the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, tying normal trade relations to free immigration policies, could be waived for Vietnam. Another year elapsed before the ill-fated July 1999 “agreement in principle” on bilateral trade. The US and Vietnamese negotiators had, in fact, agreed, under heavy pressure from the US Trade Representative’s office (USTR). When the document was translated into Vietnamese, however, certain sections became the focus of intense controversy, leading to a demand for re-negotiations. National Assembly Chairman Nong Duc Manh told a visiting Congressional delegation in February that “Vietnam always wanted to accelerate ongoing negotiations for [the] trade agreement,” but the “more significant” problem still lay in “how to make the future agreement work properly.”
Manh’s hesitancy points to what may be a fundamental reorientation on Vietnamese foreign policy. While the trade agreement has sat on leaders’ desks, the past few months have quickened a trend towards rapprochement with China. A border treaty was signed in December 1999 after years of negotiation. The Vietnamese press has been full of articles on high-level Chinese-Vietnamese meetings, traditional Lunar New Year greetings, and the historical “friendship” between the two Communist Parties. In the past, of course, the Chinese and Vietnamese have often been much less than friendly. But now the party leaders are coming together, for obvious reasons. They control similar “market-Leninist” systems, with comparable pressures of economic and social change and a common desire to preserve some measure of social stability which is seen to require maintaining a single party state. Just as importantly, both feel threatened by what they perceive as US “hegemony.”
Kissingerian power politics would call for the US to play China and Vietnam off against each other, as in the 1970s. But even these geopolitical calculations, void of humanitarian concern, have eluded present-day Washington policymakers. The US should view an emerging alliance between Vietnam and China as a significant foreign policy failure.
Vietnam, or course, has not lost its caution of China’s millennia long regional ambitions, and conflicting territorial claims in the East or South China Sea remain volatile. Growing rapprochement with Beijing will be carefully balanced by ties with ASEAN and particularly with the bordering countries of Cambodia and Laos. Closer relations with Europe, Japan and especially with the US are an important counterweight to China, but not at the cost of acceding to the social and political paradigms proclaimed by countries which have sought to control Vietnam in the more recent past.
Vietnamese leaders’ concerns over the bilateral trade agreement should not be explained away as obstructionism. Communist Party leaders wish to keep state-owned enterprises afloat as the leading sector in the economy in part to avoid the mass social dislocation and unemployment evident in the former Soviet Union. Some of the questions they are posing are the same as those asked by demonstrators at the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and at UNCTAD in Bangkok this February. Will national sovereignty be undermined by multinational interests? Is open access for corporate capitalism the only alternative? Can a nation that fought against the odds for its own independence and unity also succeed in resisting the worst features of global capitalist excess?
These questions have few easy answers. Advocates for peace and reconciliation with Vietnam should welcome the trade agreement on the whole, as it eliminates a portion of the double standard Vietnam has suffered, and since both the government and the majority of Vietnamese desire closer ties to the US. But just as normal relations did not automatically solve political disputes between the two countries, neither will increased trade solve the economic inequality which has arisen in part from the war and embargo. A trade agreement must also be complemented by a fairer trading system.
Normalization of relations with Vietnam has presented a golden opportunity to resolve the outstanding war-related issues of landmines, Agent Orange, trade and debt. Yet progress has been slow. True reconciliation takes time, and perhaps a new generation without the habits and memories of past policy mistakes. For reconciliation and full understanding between people to be achieved, the obstacles must first be cleared away. US policy often places the blame on Vietnam, but in fact many of the obstacles persist primarily on the American side. Removing these “landmines of the heart” forms our task for the next 25 years of peace.
Andrew Wells-Dang is Program Director at the Asia Pacific Center for Justice and Peace in Washington, DC. An earlier version of this article appeared in the Spring 2000 Asia Pacific Advocate.