Vietnam's ongoing significance

In our latest discussion article, Paddy Farrington underlines the enduring significance of Vietnam's national liberation movement.

50 years ago, on 30th April 1975, Vietnam finally prevailed in its epic struggle for self-determination. Vietnam’s leader Ho Chi Minh had proclaimed the country’s independence on 2nd September 1945, thus putting an end to 87 years of colonial occupation by France, and more recently by Japan, which had ended in famine.

But a few years later, with military support from British forces, France regained control of much of the country and reasserted its colonial rule. Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh (the League for Independence of Vietnam) mobilised Vietnamese society with an emancipatory programme of land reform and mass literacy, and eventually defeated the French foreign legion at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, thus putting an end to colonial rule. But Vietnam was cheated of full independence, a victim of the big power politics that prevailed at the time. The country was artificially partitioned, the promise of a referendum on reunification was broken (Eisenhower being convinced that Ho Chi Minh would win) and soon the United States under Kennedy ramped up its military support to prop up its client regime in South Vietnam. Thus started what became known as the Vietnam war – though in Vietnam it was always the American war.

It was to develop into a conflict of extreme violence, pitting the military might of the world’s most powerful superpower against what was then a largely peasant society. After staging a false flag operation in the Tonkin Gulf, the United States under Lyndon Johnson started its bombing of North Vietnam and despatched troops to the South in increasing numbers. The National Liberation Front (often derogatorily referred to as the Viet Cong) pursued an intense guerilla campaign in South Vietnam, deploying ambushes, bamboo traps, and commando operations, culminating in the Têt offensive of 1968. Brutal repression of all opposition, systematic assassinations under the infamous Phoenix Programme, napalming of Vietnamese villages, and systematic defoliation of the countryside by toxic chemicals in a vain attempt to deny guerilla forces their forest cover were to no avail. Nor was Nixon and Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of Cambodia. Eventually, after a final destructive bombing spree against North Vietnam in 1972, American ground forces were forced to withdraw, and South Vietnam’s regime collapsed three years later. Reunification of the country soon followed.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the big power politics that had proved so costly to Vietnam took a further toll. Tensions mounted between Vietnam and China’s Deng Xiaoping, who could not accept Vietnam’s rejection of Chinese tutelage. Attacks by the China-backed Khmer Rouge along the Cambodia-Vietnam border eventually prompted Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978 to remove the genocidal Khmer Rouge, who had slaughtered up to 3 million of the country’s 7.5 million people in the name of an extremist Maoism-inspired ideology. China immediately responded by a brief, yet brutal, invasion of Vietnam’s northern provinces. In the wake of this crisis, hundreds of thousands of Chinese-Vietnamese people fled the country in conditions of extreme peril (the ‘boat people’).

Vietnam at this point faced what was perhaps the worst economic crisis of its history. The command economy that had sustained it during the war, together with reductions in aid from the Soviet Union and flawed policies of land collectivisation, led to a slump which resulted in severe food shortages, though starvation was averted through rationing. This was compounded by international isolation imposed by an unholy alliance of China, the US and the UK, all of whom still sided with the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations. Eventually, after 1986, Vietnam embraced its current path of Doi Moi or market-oriented socialism and rebuilt its relations with both China and the US (currently sorely tested again by Trump’s tariffs). The country was able at last to move on from half a century of war, destruction, and immense human suffering, though the problems it faced in reintegrating the world economy were to be no less daunting.

The Vietnam war brought the brutal reality of imperialism into the public consciousness, especially that of young people, and resulted in a worldwide movement of political and practical solidarity. The war, and its appalling brutality, was broadcast on TV into peoples’ living rooms, as the Gaza genocide is today. For a generation, ‘Vietnam’ came to represent the depredations and moral bankruptcy of US imperialism and all that went with it. Yet to this day, with few exceptions, journalists, writers and film-makers focus not on what the war did to Vietnam and its people, but on what ‘Vietnam’ did to America.

The human toll in Vietnam was breath-taking. There are no precise estimates of the numbers killed; they could reach several million. The impact on the living was likewise beyond imagination. Between 1980 to 1982, I lived and worked in Vietnam. I saw for myself the war memorials by bombed marketplaces, and the remains of US aircraft lying in the rice fields around Hanoi. I met some of the doctors and nurses who had spent years working in field hospitals in the jungles of South Vietnam, travelling along the Ho Chi Minh trail. I met up with some of the peasant-fighters, extraordinary in their ordinariness, who had burrowed into tunnels to continue their resistance, just a few miles outside Saigon. I witnessed some of the vast areas devastated by the toxic chemical Agent Orange where no crops would grow, leaving a lasting legacy of birth defects down the generations. But for the most part, I learned to refrain from asking about the war unless it was raised by others, the quick changes of subject testifying to untold trauma.

Current conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, the Congo, not to mention Trump’s threats to Canada and Greenland, show that the right to self-determination in the face of aggression remains a salient issue. The Vietnam war was both a war for national self-determination, and a proxy war between the great powers. In 1946, faced with the reassertion by France of its colonial claim to Vietnam and its demand that the Viet Minh hand over Cochinchina (Vietnam’s southernmost tip), Ho Chi Minh famously wrote to US President Truman to request assistance. Truman did not respond: his cold war policy of containment had begun, and Vietnam was in the wrong camp. On several other occasions, Vietnam fell prey to big power politics: in 1954, when Vietnam was partitioned in the interests of peaceful coexistence between the Soviet Union and the United States, and after 1972 when China’s rapprochement with the United States eventually led to it turning against Vietnam and siding with the US.

Confronted with the shifting sands of great power politics, further illustrated today by Donald Trump’s erratic alignment with Putin on Ukraine, one guiding constant remains: the need for principled solidarity for those fighting against aggression and for self-determination. While the circumstances of the two conflicts are totally different, refusal to support Ukraine now, because it is backed by Western powers, is just as wrong-headed as it was to withhold support for Vietnam during the French and American wars because it was backed by the Soviet Union. Such a position simply relays imperialism’s narratives in denying that oppressed peoples have agency.

One of the many remarkable people I met in Vietnam was Nguyen Khac Vien, doctor, political organiser, historian, and erstwhile Head of the foreign languages publishing house where I worked. Then retired, he instructed the Vietnamese army in traditional Vietnamese dance, which has its roots in the martial arts. He once explained to me: “It’s about resistance and self-reliance. It teaches you to find your inner strength through breathing and balance, and to overcome a stronger opponent by turning his strength against him. It’s the story of Vietnam expressed as dance.”

Photograph: Nguyen Khac Vien

Published 5 May 2025