Capitalism Won the Vietnam War
This week will see another Liberation Day—in Vietnam.
I walked along the parade route leading to the former Presidential Palace, now Reunification Palace.
In America we remember it differently. As Saigon fell, Operation Frequent Wind evacuated 7,000 Americans and locals. Helicopters ran in 10-minute intervals to the USS Okinawa and other ships in the Seventh Fleet.
The last helicopter out—the famous photo you may remember is from the Pittman apartment building the day before—left the U.S. Embassy around 8 a.m., evacuating the last of a Marine Guard.
Later that day, North Vietnamese troops in a Soviet tank, and, with a hint of the future, an identical Chinese knockoff, busted through the gates and liberated the palace, ending the war.
It’s well beyond my pay grade to relitigate the Vietnam War, but there are so many lessons.
The first was the damage to America’s national self-esteem. We lost.
A major rationale for the Vietnam War was the domino theory—that saving South Vietnam was necessary to halt the spread of communism in the region.
That ended up both right and wrong. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were killed after the war ended or put in re-education camps. More than 1.5 million mostly educated Cambodians were killed by the Communist Khmer Rouge’s Pol Pot in the killing fields between 1975-79.
But while today’s Vietnamese government calls itself communist, with hammer-and-sickle flags still flying, Vietnam’s state ownership of everything ended in 1986.
The dominos didn’t topple far or for long. Capitalism now rules, and Vietnam is modernizing.
Vietnam, with a population of more than 100 million, has tons of factories.
Average manufacturing wages are $2 an hour, vs. $6 in China and $29 in the U.S.
Everyone in Vietnam seems to have a scooter and a smartphone with WhatsApp—increased living standards as they move up to higher valued layers of our horizontal empire.
Looking back, we won the Tet battle but lost the media and eventually the needless and brutal war.
But 50 years later, Vietnam’s economy is mostly capitalist. For one-tenth of our wages, they gladly manufacture American designs—clothes and sneakers (including half of Nike’s shoes) and even Apple AirPods and iPads—in exchange for pieces of paper with Benjamin Franklin’s picture on them.
With utmost respect to the 58,220 U.S. troops and countless civilians lost during the Vietnam War, I’d say we won.
Andy Kessler Wall Street Journal 27 April 2025
The fall of Saigon, 50 years on
Tillbaka till Rolfs länktips 29 april 2025
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