Victorious North Vietnamese troops on tanks take up positions outside Independence Palace in Saigon, April 30, 1975, the day the South Vietnamese government surrendered, ending the Vietnam War. (AP Photo/Yves Billy)
By Paul Atkinson
As the Trump tariff offensive is unleashed, one of the nations most impacted is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. A nation of 100 million people, with 60 percent under age 30 crammed into an area the size of New Mexico, it has become one of America's fastest growing trading partners.
Vietnam’s exports to the United States - electronics and semiconductors, apparel and footwear - totaled 30 percent of its 2024 gross domestic product, and grew at a rate faster than that of any other country. Foreign investors, among them Apple and Nike, have relocated major portions of their operations from China. But as of April 9, those exports were scheduled to be hit with a 46 percent tariff, among the highest applied to any nation.
Beyond just trade, Vietnam sees its relationship with the United States as a potential counterweight to the risk of Chinese dominance in Southeast Asia. In 2023, the Biden administration initialed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with Hanoi, one that covered not only economic relations, but included a commitment to “Maintaining Substantive Diplomatic and Political Engagement.”
Vietnam’s To Lam was the first world leader to respond to President Trump. He requested a 45-day delay in implementation of duties and offered to reduce to zero his country’s 9 percent average tariff on U.S. goods. While non-committal, the President described their conversation as “very productive.”
What makes this mercantile brinkmanship ironic is that it unfolds in the shadow of a remarkable historical milestone. April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of a 30-year struggle to unify Vietnam under Communist rule.
America’s role in support of the non-communist Republic of Vietnam began in the Eisenhower years, following the 1954 defeat and withdrawal of the French colonial administration, and the country’s “temporary” division at the 17th parallel. It officially ended in 1973, when President Richard Nixon removed the remaining US troops based in the South.
Over that span, the costs of the war were enormous. America suffered 58,000 combat deaths and 175,000 wounded and disabled. Total Vietnamese deaths, civilian and military, were in the millions. Two million more, many of Chinese descent, fled the postwar South as refugees, tens of thousands drowning in the South China Sea.
Four U.S. administrations spent $140 billion on the war: $1 trillion in today’s dollars. The protracted conflict upended U.S. politics, compromised America’s role in global finance, and began a debate on the limits of American power that continues to this day.
The circumstances of America's Vietnam withdrawal are worth recalling. As Richard Nixon confronted his 1972 re-election, he wanted the war-weary electorate focused on his efforts toward detente with Communist China and the Soviet Union. In contrast to public pledges of “peace with honor,” the President and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger recognized that the military outlook was hopeless. “Vietnamization,” the strategy whereby South Vietnam’s army would assume responsibility for the country’s defenses, was not working.
Nixon and Kissinger hoped to orchestrate a “decent interval” between the time American troops pulled out and the North conquered the South. They were, in the words of University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, “well aware that they were abandoning the Nguyen Van Thieu government in Saigon when they negotiated the American withdrawal with Hanoi in 1972 and early 1973.” They wanted out of Vietnam “once and for all.”
The abandonment accelerated with the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s August 1974 resignation. That fall Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year. It is debatable whether the additional spending would have made a difference or just postponed the inevitable. But by April of 1975, the “decent interval” concluded with haunting photos of panicked Saigon residents scrambling to board American helicopters.
Half a century later, America and Vietnam face each other across a very different strategic landscape. Post-Cold War detente with China and Russia has dissolved. Vietnam, while it remains an authoritarian regime, offers Washington a potential strategic partner in its struggle with Beijing for mastery in Asia.
In 1967, on the shores of Hanoi’s Truc Bach Lake, the North Vietnamese erected a monument celebrating the spot where Lt. Commander John McCain was shot down in an American bombing raid. Today, visitors will see a renovated version, representing a symbol of Vietnamese American reconciliation. At Senator McCain’s 2018 death, Hanoi residents held a memorial at the site, leaving flowers to remember the man who was a major figure in establishing U.S. diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995.
America’s first attempt at “Vietnamization” ended in failure. Now, in a remarkable reversal, it confronts a Vietnam fully capable of standing on its own in a US-led Asian coalition. It would be tragic if such an opportunity, the legacy of John McCain and millions of others, were abandoned in favor of taxes on tee shirts, sneakers and iPhones.
Paul Atkinson, a Bonita Springs resident, is a member of the Naples Council on World Affairs and a contributor to The Hill newspaper.
President Joe Biden visits the John McCain Memorial marker in Hanoi, Vietnam on Monday, September 11, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Liberty lives in light
© 2025 by David Silverberg
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