Today, the Vietnamese view the U.S. in a positive light. About three-quarters of Vietnamese (76%) expressed a favorable opinion of the U.S. in a 2014 Pew Research Center survey. More highly educated people (89%) gave the U.S. especially high marks. Young people ages 18-29 were particularly affirmative (89%), but the U.S. is seen positively even by those who are old enough to have lived through the Vietnam War. Among those ages 50 and older, more than six-in-ten rated the U.S. favorably.
Shit, you probably couldn’t get those numbers even in the US.
Ho Chi Minh himself was a fan of the US. He spent some good time in the states though what he really did there is clouded in mystery. The first sentence of the Vietnamese declaration of independence is copied, verbatim, from the American one, generally speaking the anti-colonial attitude and liberalism where up his alley and back in the days the US politicians hadn’t yet really found their identity as imperialist swine… this was some 20 years before WWII.
Oh and he worked for a time for Auguste Escoffier.
Had the Yanks continued to antagonise Vietnam after the war the whole thing would probably look quite differently, also, if Vietnam was an island located in the Caribbeans. But having a country as ally there that really doesn’t like Chinese imperialism is something US hawks like so they were willing to overlook the fact that the local regime was state capitalist instead of fascist.
Yeah, Vietnam wrecked our anti-imperialist cred that we cultivated after WW2. While our actions in Latin America have always been questionable at best, we were actually major supporters of international independence movements against our own nominal allies in Europe, and for that reason, maintained a strong anti-imperialist reputation all throughout the 50s.
Not that this reputation wasn’t tarnished with very not-anti-imperialist involvement in some cases - Operation Ajax coming to mind for an example outside of Latin America - but that it also wasn’t completely unwarranted - such as our involvement in pressuring the UK during the Suez Canal Crisis, or the fact that we ran interference for Moroccan independence groups against France, or our support for Indonesian independence against the Netherlands.
All of that, gone in a metaphorical instant, washed away in a tide of blood and war crimes.
Makes sense the the Vietnamese have generally favorable views on America, after all compared to their hundreds of years of stuggle against China the American-Vietnam war was basically a particularly destructive skirmish.
I always hear it as:
“Why don’t we hate the Americans? We fought the Americans for 20 years. But we fought the French for 200 and the Chinese for 2000.”
The Vietnam War was an event that culturally shattered a generation here in the States, and first showed many American homes the brutality of a war fought by unrestrained soldiery, and by the same forces they had always been told fought for ‘good’. But for all the greater destruction wreaked by it in Vietnam, for them, American involvement in the Vietnam War was just the tail end of their independence movement, the moment before victory. “Gg, no re, if you don’t fuck with us again we don’t have to be enemies.”
If one will forgive both the Americentrism and the flippant comparison, we were their Hessians - foreigners involved in a struggle that wasn’t ours for dubious reasons of financial gain and diplomatic ties.
