Vietnam: From Great Foe to Great Friend (#208)

From the perspective of the North Vietnamese, the war with the United States was a continuation of their war for independence. The North Vietnamese viewed the U.S.
as a colonial power, similar to the French, trying to take over their country. They had fought the French, and after they had decisively defeated the French in the Battle of Dien Ben Phu and the French had withdrawn, the United States came.
The Vietnamese suffered massively from what they called the American War, two million civilian casualties and one million military deaths, as well as harm from Agent Orange. U.S.
deaths were around 60,000, with over 150,000 wounded. Now, nearly 50 years after the end of this brutal war, the United States and Vietnam have gone from enemies to partners with friendly relations, including strong trade and security cooperation.
Vietnam is one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, and the U.S. is one of Vietnam's largest export markets.
Recently, there was even an official upgrade in the Vietnam-U.S. relationship to a, quote,

comprehensive strategic partnership. This change raises the United States by two levels,

to the top status in Vietnam's hierarchy of bilateral ties, to a status previously reserved

for only four countries. How did Vietnam and the United States go from enemies to friends

Thank you. previously reserved for only four countries.
How did Vietnam and the United States go from enemies to friends? And what are the lessons of reconciliation for us all? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways.
On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.
Today, I'm excited to be with U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, Mark Knapper, and I'm excited to learn how Vietnam became one of the fastest growing economies in the world and how it went from enemy to friends with the United States.
Ambassador Knapper is a member of the Senior Foreign Service of the United States Department of State, who has had multiple postings in Tokyo, Seoul, Hanoi, and Baghdad. He previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Korea and Japan before being named U.S.
Ambassador to Vietnam in 2022. Welcome, Ambassador Knapper, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Well, thank you very much, Lynn. Very much appreciate the invitation to join you.
And hello to your listeners as well. It's a great honor to be with you today.
And thank you, Ambassador, for taking the time for Three Takeaways and for your service in government. What was the impact of the so-called American War on Vietnam? Well, it was obviously This is significant.
This was a brutal war fought between our two countries over many years, one in which many American and Vietnamese lives were lost. And it was from this conflict that the United States and Vietnam began the process of healing and reconciliation, as you alluded to, not many years actually after the end of the conflict.
So in the late 70s, we began a process first to account for missing American service members. And this was a process that Vietnam unilaterally initiated, the search for missing pilots and others who were lost.
And really, it blossomed into an effort for both of our countries, working together over the last 30 more years to account for missing service members. And to date, we have, thanks to this very humane and humanitarian effort on the part of the Vietnamese government, accounted for more than 700 Americans who were lost here.
And the search continues. In the meantime, we're working with Vietnam to account for their own missing, which, as you said, sits in the hundreds of thousands.
And so to have gone from this tragic chapter of our two countries history to the point now where we jump from comprehensive to comprehensive strategic, which in Vietnam is the highest level of partners. But we did this because of our efforts, shared efforts, to address the legacies of war, not just searching for missing Americans and now missing Vietnamese, but also addressing other issues like unexploded ordnance, for example.
The last 20 years, we've been working with Vietnam to clean up these unexploded bombs and other munitions, and we've saved thousands of lives through this effort. Another effort has been cleaning up dioxin sites.
It sends a message of U.S. commitment to address these war legacy issues, as well as efforts to assist people with disabilities.
And so this is how we got to this partnership, is with sincere, genuine efforts on the part of the United States and the American people to pick stock of the legacy from our two countries' wars and try to move forward. And this is an effort that has paid off immensely in terms of friendship, partnership, the cooperative relationship that we now enjoy with Vietnam.
And it's a terrific effort to be a part of. What happened after the bitter end of this war that started Vietnam and the U.S.
on this path to reconciliation? It was recognition by courageous people, leaders in both countries about the need, of course, not to forget what happened, but the need to move on and try to, well, first of all, to address these legacies from the war, which included the search for missing American service members led in our country by veterans groups, by volunteer groups, by community organizations, but also by members of our Congress, individuals we know well, John Kerry, John McCain, Patrick Leahy. And these are folks who, with their Vietnamese counterparts, who made this very bold decision and courageous effort to try to bring our two countries together.
Initially, obviously very hesitantly, but at the same time, along with the vision of trying to bring our countries to some kind of relationship. We normalized relations in 1995,

20 years after the end of hostilities.

And in the 30 years since normalization,

we've grown this partnership in ways

that would have been unimaginable, were unimaginable.

I mean, we are Vietnam's largest export market.

They are our ninth largest trading partner.

We are the number one destination for Vietnamese students

who seek to travel abroad. The list goes on.
It's been a remarkable journey, but it did begin with the efforts by, again, a number of courageous individuals after the war, veterans, others, volunteers, community organizations, church groups, to try and address the legacies of war and bring our two countries closer together. Essentially, many years of building.
Exactly. It was not just the bitter conflict that we had, but of course, in the years after the war, there was a trade embargo on Vietnam that we imposed.
It wasn't a given that our two countries would find our way together. But actually, our relationship, our friendship, indeed, goes back to 1945, the tail end of World War II, when we had Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's leader, and he led a group of the Viet Minh who were fighting both the French and the Japanese.
But we had a team of OSS, the precursor to the CIA, a team of OSS, Office of Strategic Services. They had a team in Northern Vietnam working with Ho Chi Minh in this struggle against Imperial Japan.
And Ho Chi Minh, in fact, wrote a letter to Harry Truman suggesting that we'd be friends based on our experience together in World War II. He based Vietnam's Declaration of Independence on our own Declaration of Independence.
I mean, the preamble of Vietnam's Declaration of Independence, September 2nd, 1945, states that all persons are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unfeelible rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And so this shows that even 80 years ago, Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese were thinking about the United States as a friend, as a partner.
Of course, in the intervening years, geopolitics and other considerations got in the way. We became enemies.
We were foes. We fought a terrible war.
And the fact that we found our way back together, as we have now, over the last 30 years, it's a remarkable journey. It's a journey that Hollywood scriptwriter could not have written, but it's one that's based on the efforts and the sincere goodwill of Vietnamese and Americans to build our relationship to the friendship and the partnership that today we now enjoy.
It is a truly remarkable story and truly remarkable that Vietnam's constitution is informed by the United States one. I didn't know that.
How did Vietnam become one of the fastest growing economies in Asia? I think it's based on a number of things. After Vietnam, by 1986, initiated some economic reforms to open up its economy to foreign investment, to greater trade interaction with the rest of the world.
And we saw a number of companies, American and others, coming in here to invest. Of course, in Vietnam, you have a highly educated population, the strategic location regionally, the heart of Southeast Asia, growing infrastructure, whether it's seaports, airports.
And I think based on tremendous interest by foreign companies, American, South Korean, Japanese, and others, I've come in here manufacturing. Of course, in the beginning, it was relatively light manufacturing, things like garments, textiles.
But Vietnam has quickly, over the last three years, moved up the value chain, so to speak, to the point where now they're part of the world to make an electric supply chain. They assemble automobiles, they manufacture electric vehicles and batteries.
That's been a key driver of the growth is foreign direct investment willingness to welcome foreign companies to nurture its own companies. And so it's been a tremendous story of growth and prosperity here.
And how would you describe Vietnam's government? It's a government led, of course, by the Communist Party. But the National Assembly here is of elected representatives, plays a key role as well in drafting and implementing legislation, working hand in hand with the government.
It's government-led, they call the four pillars. Number one being the head of the Communist Party, but also there is a president, there is a prime minister who leads the government, and then there is the head of the National Assembly of elected 500 elected representatives.
And so consensus-based leadership, and it was in fact the general secretary of the Communist Party who welcomed President Biden here last September, at which time our two countries announced the upgrade of our relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership. How do you think that Vietnamese leaders view the United States? Based on my own experience here, I've been here about two and a half years, we have an extremely friendly, productive, close relationship, I think.
When one looks at the goals that Vietnam has set for itself, for example, by the year 2050, Vietnam seeks to be a net carbon neutral economy. By 2045, they seek to be a high income economy.
By the year 2030, they hope to have a digital economy. over the next several years.
They want to grow their high-tech industry. It includes semiconductors and other high-tech manufacturing.
And doing some want to grow their high-tech workforce by up to 100,000 computer scientists, electrical engineers, technicians, you name it. every one of these goals, every one of these aspirations, the United States is a part of.
We work with Vietnam on their clean energy and their green energy transition.

We're working with Vietnam to help them grow their high-tech economy. We're working with Vietnam on workforce development, skilling workers to take on the challenges of the 21st century economy.
We're working with Vietnam on issues related to cybersecurity, working with Vietnam to ensure that they've got an IT infrastructure that's free from untrusted companies out there. And so all of these efforts, the United States is a part of.
We are hand in hand with Vietnam. We see our future as being inextricably linked.
I think Vietnam and Vietnam's leaders, of course, in my meetings with them, it's a message that's been very consistent and one that's very future-oriented. What are the lessons from the reconciliation of Vietnam and the United States, and where can we apply them? It's quite a remarkable story.
I think one of the key lessons is just it takes courage. It takes courage from individuals in both countries to have, you know, at the time, gone against the grain of society, United States and Vietnam, I mean, after the war, it was a tremendously painful experience, a searing history that we had, but to be able to say, look, it's time to address these issues, it's time to not forget, but to try and move forward.
And so I'm humbled by and in awe of the efforts of those who came before me,

for all of us to have taken these steps, sometimes at political risk. And in both countries,

I took individuals who were Vietnam and the U.S. to do this.
I would hope this would be applicable

in other situations. This is something that we have friends that the U.S.
has stood in peace in

Washington, D.C. They spend a lot of time thinking about this.
Where can we apply the lessons from this effort towards reconciliation, this effort to build understanding and build confidence in each other? Before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything you'd like to mention that you haven't already touched upon? What should I have asked you that I have not? Education ties are increasingly significant between our two countries. We host in the United States more than 30,000 Vietnamese students.
They contribute a billion dollars a year to our economy. Vietnam is the fifth largest source of foreign students in the U.S.
after China, India, South Korea, the U.K. And I mean, by any measure, Vietnam is kind of an outlier, right? Whether it's in population size, whether it's GDP size, the fact that Vietnam is number five among countries who send their students to the US, I think it sends a really important message about the confidence that Vietnamese families, young people, have in an American education, but also the desire to build bridges between our two countries.
Nothing builds bridges greater than educational ties. I mean, I myself as a young person, I was a student in Japan, but the more Vietnamese students we can get in the U.S.
to study, to build bridges, to deepen understanding between our two countries, the better. I would love to see more Vietnamese study in the U.S., and I would love to see more Americans come here to study.
We have a number of Fulbright students and Fulbright teachers, but I do want to figure out a way, try to figure out a way to get more Americans here because I think nothing, nothing creates understanding and promotes reconciliation and other efforts more than this kind of people to people, kind of really sticky sort of ties that come from living and studying, working in each other's countries. Yes, I agree with you.
It's so powerful. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? Well, first of all, when you think of Vietnam, please don't think of the war.
Vietnam is more than just war. Vietnam is a friend and a partner of the United States in which we share geopolitical, strategic, economic, people-to-people interests.
This is something I think benefits the United States, benefits Vietnam, and it's a trajectory that's upward and I think will continue to be positive. I think the second takeaway would be that this didn't happen in a vacuum, that the U.S.-Vietnam story began as one that began 80 years ago, in which we were friends, practically allies, then became bitter foes, enemies, combatants.
Then we found our way together again to be friends and partners. And it's the efforts of courageous individuals in both countries to promote reconciliation, to promote understanding, to promote confidence through Vietnam, their very humane humanitarian work to help us find our own missing, to bring closure to hundreds of American families who were able to marry their loved ones who have been missing here in Vietnam.
It's through these efforts of reconciliation that we've built the relationship we join today. It's very powerful.
The third takeaway would be, come to Vietnam. This is a beautiful country.
It's a country on the move it's a dynamic economy tremendously friendly and diligent people here who welcome americans who welcome visitors students business people investors it's a terrific place to visit to live to work to study and certainly hope that among your listeners you'll be able to welcome more more Americans here because it really is a tremendous, tremendous story, the story of Vietnam, the story of the United States. It is.
It is a tremendous story and it is a beautiful and wonderful country to visit. Thank you so much for your time today and thank you for your service as ambassador.
Thank you very much. I really appreciate this opportunity.
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I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways.

Thanks for listening.