White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Vietnam Welcomes America with Open Arms

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No grunt slogging through the jungles of Vietnam could imagine that in 2014, 41 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese would be welcoming back Americans as investors, tourists, advisers and protectors.

Next year is a big year in Vietnam. It is the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975. It is also the 20th anniversary of the normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam, a country where so much American and Vietnamese blood was spilled.

The Vietnam War started in the Eisenhower Administration, dragged down Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and was ended in the Nixon Administration amid controversy that tore America apart and has informed its foreign policy ever since.

It will be remembered in the annals of war for the limits it revealed on mechanized fighting, and the challenge of asymmetrical fighting and wrong-headiness. But it also deserves mention in the annals of peace for the surprising speed in which the war has been put aside, especially in Vietnam, where the gory past has been buried and the future embraced.

Today’s Vietnam is a place where the United States is admired and emulated. And the Vietnamese want nothing so much as to be closer to Americans.

Twenty years ago when I traveled from Hanoi, south along the spine of the country, to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, I was astounded by the way the war had been willfully forgotten: people I met did not want to talk about it.

Da Nang still was set about with hardened bunkers, Hue, which had been the national capital until 1945, was a sad ruin, but people were determinedly forward-looking. They wanted to know three things: how could they get American goods, how could sell their goods in the U.S. market, and what was the United States going to do about China?

A generation later, Vietnam is more passionate in its desire to get close to the United States. The government of Vietnam is making a new push for American investment, particularly in the privatization of infrastructure, which is still government-controlled and beset by inefficiency and corruption.

Vietnam Report, a business and data service, has just released a comprehensive white paper, prepared by Corr Analytics, a New York-based risk management consultancy, that paints an agreeable picture of investment opportunities, particularly in those industries that the Vietnamese government is anxious to hive off to the private sector. Of 432 projects identified by the government, Corr has honed in on what it believes to be the 31 best-investment targets. These range from opportunities — from a few million dollars to over $7 billion — in finance, infrastructure, manufacturing and petroleum.

The backstory is that Vietnam needs more than U.S. investment. As it struggles against China in the South China Sea, over territorial claims on small island groups that are thought to contain large hydrocarbon reserves, Vietnam wants the United States to be a visible friend.

There is even talk that the United States, might establish a naval base at Cam Rahn Bay, its legendary base and deep-water port during the Vietnam War. This, the argument goes, would compensate for the loss of the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Come back, Yanks.

Several analysts have told me that they believe Vietnam to be an excellent investment opportunity, but there are concerns. The government is nominally communist and there is only one party: the Communist Party. It is avowedly pro-business but faces human-rights issues, press-freedom issues, and the impartiality of the judiciary is questionable. Corruption is widespread and debilitating.

Yet Forbes magazine is looking to Vietnam as the new Asian investment haven. In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings, according to Corr Analytics, Vietnam is ahead of major investment destinations such as China, India and Brazil. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has made it clear that his country is open for business – particularly American business.

Tourism is growing, especially at Vietnam’s superb beaches. Lauren Graham, who stars in the NBC drama “Parenthood,” has taken a bicycle trip with her father, a Washington lobbyist and fluent Vietnamese speaker.

Some who fought in Vietnam have joined the ranks of its boosters, like Tom Patterson, the famed Harvard professor, who is helping to develop a high-technology village near Nha Trang and Cam Rhan Bay, where he was once stationed.

The generational change also has made a difference. Much of the Vietnamese population was not born during the war. A new generation of Americans has been shaped by war in the Middle East not in Asia. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

William F. Buckley, a Life of Fun

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All of my adult life, William F. Buckley Jr. has been a player on the national stage. It is hard to believe that Buckley is no longer with us; that he has to be moved in our mental computers from an active folder to one labeled memory.

Thousands of writers have claimed that Buckley was the father of modern conservatism. Maybe. What is certain is that Buckley has carried the conservative standard from the time he wrote his seminal book, “God and Man at Yale.” He followed this with the founding of National Review in 1955. National Review sought to give an intellectual patina to the business-dominated conservatism of the Eisenhower era.

Buckley was a grandee; a boisterous intellectual who, at some level, never left the debating society at Yale. Above all, Buckley was a man of fun.

His conservatism was never in tow with the conservatism of the Republican Party. It was Buckley conservatism–as much informed by the high spirits of European aristocracy as it was by the yeoman farmers of America.

Buckley was hugely imaginative: He did things that had never been done before. His television program, “Firing Line,” was all Buckley: intellectuals disagreeing with wit and erudition. For 33 years it was a mainstay on PBS–which at the time of the program’s founding, in 1966, was the only network for intellectuals. While many conservatives were damning PBS, Buckley was quietly remaking it with “Firing Line.” In typical fashion, Buckley did not want to see his program become the product of a committee or university when he moved on. So he struck the set: “Firing Line” ceased production, but it is still remembered as an example of how television can do talking heads well.

His son, the author Christopher Buckley, said that Buckley’s contribution to the conservative movement was, among other things, to drive “the kooks” out of it. He broke with the John Birch Society and kept his distance from the radicalism of Pat Buchanan. Buckley thoughts on talk radio and extreme conservatives, like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, have not been recorded.

The conventional wisdom is that Buckley paved the way for Barry Goldwater to run for president. And the Young Americans for Freedom, who Buckley organized to support Goldwater, became the foot soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. But it seems to me that Buckley was always outside the conservative movement. His importance was as a provider of ideas and a tutor of young conservative writers, ranging from George Will to David Brooks. Most major conservative thinkers pass through National Review.

Buckley was not a fixture in Washington. He was not published in The Washington Post. He was not a courtier in the Reagan administration, as was George Will.

Many conservatives loved Buckley in principal, but kept their distance in practice. They worried about some of his not-so-conservative positions, like calling for the legalization of marijuana, and his enthusiasm for continental Europe. He loved Switzerland and retired there to write many of his books.

Even in religion, Buckley was not quite part of the movement he was credited with founding. Evangelicals embraced conservatism, and conservatives embraced evangelicals. Buckley, however, remained a very devout, very orthodox Roman Catholic.

Buckley tried to understand popular taste, but he confessed that he could not get the hang of it–especially rap music. Buckley was born a patrician who would never have to worry about money. He could apply his considerable talents and energy to his interests, including wine, food, literature and sailing.

Sometimes, Buckley seemed bored with politics. It is said that out of the public arena, he did not discuss politics.

Buckley had many favorites, most of whom shared his theatricality but not his political views. He was a close friend of John Kenneth Galbraith, the left-wing economist. He was enchanted by Malcolm Muggeridge, a radical British journalist and roue, who converted to Catholicism later in life and wrote a book about Jesus.

Everyone who worked at National Review, or was a friend of Bill, used the same word to describe the ethos: fun. Buckley was fun to be around and it was enormous fun to have him on the national stage. Sometimes the fun was mischievous, as when Buckley proposed that after he finished his term as president, Eisenhower should run as a vice president on the Nixon ticket. It was a joke, but it was one that sent scholars running to the books and lawyers pondering the legality of it. Then there was the time Buckley ran for mayor of New York. There were strings of bon mots every day, and the press had to discipline itself to cover the serious candidates and not the entertainment provided by Buckley.

Buckley did not like debating politicians: He liked debating clever people such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Michael Kinsley.

Buckley was a prodigious writer and is output ranged from politics to book reviews to travel articles. He was so industrious that he actually wrote a book about his own industry: a snapshot of two weeks in the life of one of the nation’s greatest dilettantes.

Buckley was without peer and appears to be without a successor.