V.C. in O.C.

In 1979 I was in the U.S. Army studying Russian up at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey when the Sino-Vietnamese War began. I was too young to have served in the U.S.-Vietnam War. But several of the older students at DLI had served in Vietnam. To a man, they cheered on the commie Chinese against the commie Viets. They had bad memories of North Vietnamese, who won the war after 58,000 Americans and at least 2 million Vietnamese were killed.

But times change.

Make sure you read Martin Wisckol’s piece today on the visit to Orange County by North Vietnamese — excuse me, just Vietnamese (without the “North”; I have to break that old Cold War habit) — President Nguyen Minh Triet:

But while Vietnamese-American demonstrators filled the streets outside the Dana Point’s St. Regis resort, it was also Vietnamese Americans who were filling the dining room with Nguyen – Vietnamese Americans eager to do business with Vietnam….One official on hand said Nguyen was returning home with $11 billion in business commitments.

Since junking socialism over the past 20 years, Vietnam’s economy has prospered and now is one of the hottest in Asia.

That long-ago war of 1979 played into the transition from socialism to capitalism of both China and Vietnam. The Vietnamese more than held their own against the numerically superior Chinese. Hanoi had a modern, Soviet-equipped, battle-victorious army, while China depended on the old “human wave” techniques from the Korean War — meaning get a lot of your guys killed, in this war up to 26,000 Chinese, although the number is disputed.

China’s military also had been badly damaged by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was sort of like the 1960s here in America, but without the acid rock music. Vietnam also had satellite photos supplied by the Soviets, so they could track the movements of Chinese troops. China had no similar intelligence advantage.

The result of the war for China was that it showed the old socialist system couldn’t supply the goods to the Chinese Army, let alone consumers. So Deng’s capitalist reforms were given a strong impetus.

For Vietnam, the war confirmed that socialism worked, adding to the euphoria from the 1975 victory over America. But the 1980s were not kind to socialism, as the Soviet Union’s decrepit regime began tottering under the weight of seven decades of socialist incompetence and inefficiency. In 1986, Vietnam began some capitalist reforms. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself blew up. Hanoi’s patron was gone. It couldn’t get cheap military hardware anymore from Moscow, but had to buy it on the world market.

Meanwhile, China’s capitalist reforms have turned it into an economic powerhouse, which also benefited its military. Vietnam has seen this and has accelerated its capitalist reforms, as shown by President Nguyen’s visit to Orange County.

How would things have turned out differently if the U.S. had never become involved in Vietnam, letting the commies take over the whole place much earlier than 1975? The Hanoi regime might have given up socialism earlier for the reasons given above: to strengthen themselves against their ancient Chinese opponents. But the war would not have killed all those Americans and Vietnamese. And it would not have traumatized both countries in other ways. The Vietnamese boat people might have come here sooner.

We’ll be saying something similar in 30 years about another lost war, that in Iraq.

Americans should realize that our greatest weapons are not our mighty military forces, but our ideas of liberty and free markets.

That’s what Independence Day is about, too.