This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Today marks 50 years since the Vietnam War ended. On April 30th, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the gates of the presidential palace in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. Communist soldiers hoisted their flag atop the building. Video of U.S. personnel being airlifted out of Saigon was broadcast around the world.
Some 3 million Vietnamese people were killed in the U.S. war, along with about 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians were also killed. The impact of the war is still being felt in Vietnam and the region.
Earlier today, events were held in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to mark this 50th anniversary of Vietnam’s victory over the United States. This is Tô Lâm, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
TÔ LÂM: [translated] After 50 years of national reunification and nearly 40 years of reform, Vietnam has overcome a multitude of difficulties and challenges to achieve immense triumphs of historic significance, building for ourselves the fortune, the power, the international standing and prestige that we enjoy today. From a poor, backward country ravaged by war, under embargo and isolation, today Vietnam has become a developing country approaching upper-middle income that is deeply integrated into international politics, the global economy and the civilization of humankind.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now in Pasadena, California, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of several books, including, most recently, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. His co-edited collection is also just out, titled The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971, fled the country with his family in 1975. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he writes, quote, “Most American presidents have learned the wrong lessons from the American War in Vietnam, as it is called there.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s so good to have you with us. I’m wondering if you can talk about what those wrong lessons are, especially in light of the Trump administration angering Vietnam veterans, those in Vietnam, as well, banning senior American diplomats from attending events on this 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, and then, because of outcry, reversing themselves. But tell us what you think the lessons are and the lessons that we in the United States learn wrong.
VIET THANH NGUYEN: Thanks for having me, Amy.
I think the lessons or the mistakes that American presidents have made started with Woodrow Wilson in 1919, refusing to listen to the appeal of a very young Ho Chi Minh in Paris, who had come to ask for American recognition of the Vietnamese quest for independence. And from that mistake, we’ve had a series of mistakes over the past century, mostly revolving around the fact that the United States did not recognize Vietnamese self-determination. The United States meddled in Vietnamese affairs, sided with the French in terms of their colonization, took over the French efforts after the French were defeated by Ho Chi Minh in 1954.
If the United States had not interfered, I think the outcome in the long term would have been pretty much exactly the same, with Vietnam turning into a capitalist economy, which it pretty much is now, and the United States relying on Vietnam as an ally against China. The difference would have been that if the United States had not intervened, at least 3 million Vietnamese people wouldn’t have died, and hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians, as you pointed out.
Now, the tradition of American presidents towards Vietnam has also included a use of soft power. We have relied on our cultural arm and our aid programs and the rhetoric of American democracy to try to pull Vietnam closer to us and to justify our intervention into Vietnam. Trump is not a quiet American like his predecessors. He’s an ugly American. He doesn’t believe in soft power. He believes purely in the exercise of American hard power. And we’re seeing some of those consequences in many areas, but certainly in Vietnam, where he’s trying to engage in a trade war or raise tariffs to a very high level, but also, as you’ve just mentioned, refusing to participate, at least until yesterday, in something as basic as a commemoration of a difficult and shared history.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Viet Thanh Nguyen, yet the United States, not too long after the war ended, began fixing its relationships with Vietnam and, up until recently, has engaged in major trade with Vietnam, unlike, for instance, U.S. policy toward Cuba, which it never fought a war with, but it continues to isolate and to embargo.
VIET THANH NGUYEN: I think there’s a big strategic difference between Vietnam and Cuba. Vietnam still matters a great deal in terms of the politics of the region of Southeast Asia, especially with China right to the north. Vietnam and China have always had an extremely difficult relationship, ever since China colonized Vietnam for a thousand years. Vietnam considers China its major rival, influence, threat and so on, which means that it’s willing to let bygones be bygones with the United States and wants to engage in a relationship with the United States whereby it could use American military and political aid to be a counterweight against China. And the United States also recognizes Vietnam’s potential in that way.
I don’t think Cuba has the same strategic advantage as it does — as Vietnam does for the United States. And Cuba has the problem of a very large, very vocal, very conservative Cuban American population that has tremendous influence on American politics. Vietnamese Americans are also deeply anti-communist, for the most part, but they don’t have the same political ability to manipulate or influence American foreign policy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and you’ve written, quote, “American interventions haunt the United States. President Reagan saw Central America as the next front of the Cold War” after the war in Vietnam. Could you talk about the impact of the loss, the American loss in the war in Vietnam, toward foreign policy in the years after that?
VIET THANH NGUYEN: Well, the war in Vietnam was, obviously, extremely divisive internally for the United States, and it was also a war that was a complete defeat for the United States, so a complete shock in so many ways for a United States that in the 1950s and 1960s saw itself as the ascendant global power. So the setback in terms of American military power, political power, prestige, self-confidence after 1975 was quite tremendous. American presidents on both the Democratic and Republican sides set out immediately to try to rehabilitate American power, and the fears that had led to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos were still there.
So, in 1983, Ronald Reagan gave a speech about Central America in which he declared that this was the new front of the Cold War. Nicaragua had been lost, supposedly, to the Sandinistas, and now this posed a threat to El Salvador. And he names El Salvador specifically as the first country where this Cold War would again be waged. This set the stage for our own current political climate today, because the war in Central America, especially in El Salvador, that the U.S. supported, was brutal. Thousands of Salvadorans were killed at the hands of a Salvadoran military that had been trained by the United States. Numerous atrocities were committed. Many people fled northwards to the United States as refugees. Some of them became gangsters. Some of them were deported, beginning in the Clinton administration, back to El Salvador, where they fomented or helped to become a part of a very serious gang problem with tremendous amounts of violence.
This created the opportunity for President Nayib Bukele in 2022 to declare a state of exception, that allowed him to put 80,000 people into his prisons without due process, alleged gang members, many of whom were actually not gang members. I was in San Salvador in February on the very same day that Marco Rubio was in town to sign the agreement with President Bukele to use El Salvadoran prisons to hold deportees or rendition people from the United States in prisons that were built there directly as a consequence of this long chain of history that went from Vietnam to El Salvador and now to a deportation prison.
AMY GOODMAN: You have said, Viet Thanh Nguyen, that “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” If you can explain that and also go on to talk about the U.S., especially right now, though you can give us some history, which is so important in all of your work, the U.S. attitude toward immigrants? You write in your Time magazine piece that “it is now, with Trump Administration weaponizing the fear of the other and promoting a moral panic about strangers coming to our shores. When these people, including those who are also Americans, become seen as a threat to the nation, they are no longer a part of us. Instead, they become the other to our collective self as a country.” Take it from there, Viet.
VIET THANH NGUYEN: Sure. Well, first of all, with “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam,” that was actually a slogan of the Western left during the 1980s. The same Western left that had organized against the American War in Vietnam saw enormous similarities with what was happening in El Salvador. So, that became a global rallying cry in opposition to this renewed campaign of American power in another poor country, in which the civilians would bear the brunt of American foreign policy.
Now, when it comes to the other, I’m quite familiar with that position, because you have to remember that in 1975 the majority of Americans did not want to accept refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, despite the very intimate and difficult relationship that the United States had with the region of Southeast Asia. Fast-forward 50 years, I would say that the majority of Americans, if they thought about Southeast Asian Americans in the United States, probably generally have pretty positive images of people like us, because of our food and our ethnic enclaves and the like. And meanwhile, there are now new people to be afraid of.
And this is an old cycle in American history. It is one in which people in the Trump administration have participated in, from Donald Trump to Stephen Miller, who are first- and second-generation descendants of immigrants from Europe, but who have turned in a very hard way against immigration. Vietnamese people, some of them who came as refugees and were accepted, have now said we were the good refugees back in 1975, but this time — and this is referring to the first Trump administration — these new people coming from south of the border or people who are Muslims, these are the bad refugees. So, the temptation to always create new others and to forget that the others that we had been afraid of were actually not that bad once we got familiar with them, that’s, again, an old impulse in American society. It’s led to these periodic resurgences of anti-immigrant fear and xenophobia that we can trace very far back in American history, in this case at least as far back as the phobia against Chinese immigrants in the 19th century that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act and eventually the creation of INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is the predecessor to ICE today.
