Vietnam Defence Forum

[Viet]

for a protection from a far distance. Wonderful pictures of Kilo attack submarines, armed to the teeth, by torpedo, sea mines, air defence missiles and as bonbon Kalibr cruise missiles against ships and land targets at a distance of 300 km away. should we be able to decode the software, the range can be extended to 2,500 km

 

[Viet]

Lockheed P3 Orion surveillance aircraft

this news from Germany may be of interest for Vietnam, some reports speculated Vietnam Navy wants to buy second hand Lockheed P3 Orion surveillance aircraft. 10 years ago, the germans bought 6 second hand Orions from the Dutch. the total cost including purchase and maintenance during 10 year operation: incredible 1.2 billion euro. but right now, no Orion is operational because the aircraft are under going maintenance and overhaul. very expensive. an interesting fact is Airbus performs maintenance for Lockheed aircraft, but due to lack of maintenance capacity at Airbus, delay is programmed. the for next 4 years, the budget for maintenance of the 6 aircraft will be 173 million euro. because of high operation and maintenance cost, one of 6 aircraft has even seen only 2.5 hours mid-air.

I think this bird is too expensive for Vietnam. well, unless the Japanese donates some of 73 P3s in its inventory.

http://thediplomat.com/2016/06/second-hand-japanese-p-3c-orions-might-be-the-right-call-for-vietnam/

 

[Carlosa]

PH Navy ship to make 5-day port visit to Vietnam
By: Frances Mangosing - Reporter / @FMangosingINQ
INQUIRER.net / 07:20 PM December 02, 2016

This photo taken on June 7, 2014 shows the Philippine Navy frigate BRP Ramon Alacraz anchored at the mouth of the South China Sea in Ulugan Bay off Puerto Princesa on Palawan island. AFP

A Philippine Navy ship was sent off on Friday to make a five-day port visit to Vietnam.

BRP Ramon Alcaraz (FF-16) with helicopter Agusta Westland 109 were sent off by Navy chief Vice Admiral Ronald Joseph Mercado at South Harbor in Manila.

The ship with more or less 300 Philippine Navy personnel onboard will make a port visit to Cam Ranh from Dec. 2 to 12. Aside from the crew, surface warfare students, medical team, Naval Special Operations Team and other port visit directorate members will join the visit. The mission team is headed by Commodore Albert Mogol, commander of Fleet-Marine Ready Force.

Some of the activities during the visit include drills for unplanned encounters at sea, maneuvers and communication exercise, search and rescue exercise, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

“These exercises will give us an opportunity to not only practice what might be called upon to do in any given situation, but also the chance to establish a professional relationship with our allies, making us a more capable force working together at sea,” said Navy public affairs chief Captain Lued Lincuna.

The two navies will also hold another activity in Pugad Island or Southwest Cay in the South China Sea before the year ends.

Read more: https://globalnation.inquirer.net/150330/ph-navy-ship-make-5-day-port-visit-vietnam#ixzz4RgyeCf3I
Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook

 

[Carlosa]

Updated picture of the reclamation on Spratly Island. The southern part of the runway appears to be finished and the construction of the hangars is progressing nicely.

 

[Viet]

 

[TenLua]

Vietnam will be making a big mistake if they purchase American equipment. We can/will render any and all our products inoperable should they want. Remember what the cia did in Vietnam; they will use the dirtiest, most dishonorable method.

ha ha ha ...too early, I think we should concentrate on more practical things on earth. Just reading this nice toy. Vietnam made two variants of underwater bombs KMP and UĐM, for water depth up to 125 m. especially suitable for attacking submerged enemy submarines. or we could lay several rings of 1,000 such black metal bowls to protect our island holdings from surprise attacks from our lovely northern neighbour. with the potential of bringing down the entire commercial traffic in the South China sea to a standstill.

Oh ye of little faith. Aim high.

 

[TenLua]

You think those state of the art passenger aircraft just randomly fall out of the sky with important people on board? So naive. These aircraft (boeing) are equipped with devices planted by the cia that will render hydraulics, fuel systems, etc....useless. You honestly believe they can't find a 300 million dollar aircraft when they can locate the pubic hair on your nuts? Don't be foolish.

Think about it. Why the sudden change of heart when they decided to sell weapons to Vietnam? Because they know when it comes to it, they can locate and destroy the equiment you bought from them without ever leaving the war room.

The American people know all about it. They know their own government do not care about them. They know.

 

[Viet]

Vietnam will be making a big mistake if they purchase American equipment. We can/will render any and all our products inoperable should they want. Remember what the cia did in Vietnam; they will use the dirtiest, most dishonorable method.

Oh ye of little faith. Aim high.

come on you want to kill my dream of Aegis destroyers? I think before Vietnam army buys any lethal US weapon a careful consideration should be conducted. Trust is the most important thing, access to the source code is not bad, either. As you said it, we should not trust blindly any foreign nation.

@Carlosa

Considering the disaster the German armed forces with the P3 surveillance aircraft, I believe we should opt for newer and modern bird. What about airbus?

 

[TenLua]

come on you want to kill my dream of Aegis destroyers? I think before Vietnam army buys any lethal US weapon a careful consideration should be conducted. Trust is the most important thing, access to the source code is not bad, either. As you said it, we should not trust blindly any foreign nation.

@Carlosa

Considering the disaster the German armed forces with the P3 surveillance aircraft, I believe we should opt for newer and modern bird. What about airbus?

No matter what you do, you cannot cover everything they can do to your equipment. Best bet is to not waste money on it. Some people simply cannot be trusted.

 

[Carlosa]

come on you want to kill my dream of Aegis destroyers? I think before Vietnam army buys any lethal US weapon a careful consideration should be conducted. Trust is the most important thing, access to the source code is not bad, either. As you said it, we should not trust blindly any foreign nation.

@Carlosa

Considering the disaster the German armed forces with the P3 surveillance aircraft, I believe we should opt for newer and modern bird. What about airbus?

The C-295 MPA should be fine and the aircraft will also be brand new.

 

[Viet]

military exercise. more lowtech than hightech

 

[Carlosa]

Why Do the Americans Still Need Vietnam and the Vietnamese Need Them?
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164179
by Christopher Goscha

Christopher Goscha is an associate professor of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The author and editor of numerous books on Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and international relations in English and French, he lives in Montreal, Canada. His latest book is Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016).



President Obama’s highly publicized visit to Vietnam in May 2016 reminded us of the important role this small country continues to play in global geopolitics. As the Chinese directly challenge American naval dominance over the Pacific and Indians Oceans, Vietnamese and American strategists have increasingly put their past differences behind them in order to focus on how best to deal with China’s increasingly aggressive claims to the sea, many of its islands, and lanes.

Many observers, especially those opposed to America’s military intervention in Vietnam in the mid-20th century, tend to downplay the geopolitical importance of Vietnam. America had no business getting involved in Vietnam in the first place. The famous ‘domino theory’ justifying American intervention in Vietnam was flawed. The communist threat was overblown from the start. But one doesn’t have to believe in the ‘domino theory’ or take sides for or against American intervention in the ‘Vietnam’ War’ to recognize that Vietnam remains one of these historically coveted areas of the globe where empires go.

The Americans were hardly the first to intervene in Vietnam for geopolitical reasons and they were not the last. Because of its overland connections to Southeast Asia and its maritime opening to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Vietnam has always tempted bigger powers to intervene. The Chinese empire ruled northern Vietnam for almost a thousand years beginning around the second century BCE. As the empire’s southern most province, Vietnam served as a gateway for China’s trade with Indian Ocean markets extending to India and the Middle East. Indeed, much as the Silk Road pulled the Chinese empire towards Eurasia’s interior, the Indian Ocean’s markets drew it towards the south. Chinese trade with the world’s other great empire of that time, Rome, went across the Silk Road the Indian Ocean. It is no accident that Roman coins have been unearthed in today’s southern Vietnam.

The Vietnamese secured their independence in 939, but briefly lost it again to the Chinese in the early fifteenth century as the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) recolonized Vietnam as part of its wider imperial expansion that sent Chinese armadas across the Indian Ocean as far as eastern Africa and the Red Sea. The Mongols had also tried to pass through Vietnam in the 13th century in order to take control of the Spice Islands of today’s Indonesia. The Vietnamese pushed them back by land while the Japanese and Javanese did so by sea. And although the Vietnamese regained their independence from the Ming Chinese in 1427, we often forget that they then pushed their own empire southwards to benefit from trade with the Indian Ocean world dominated until then by the Cham and Khmers.

Following the Chinese recall of its navy from the high seas in 1433, a new set of European imperial powers expanded into the region via the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Spanish and Portuguese followed by the British, French, and Dutch. These Western imperial powers adopted increasingly aggressive policies towards Asia in the nineteenth century when the French colonized Vietnam and the British confiscated Singapore, Burma, and Malaya. Meanwhile, the Americans crossed the Pacific Ocean to take the Philippines from the Spanish while the Japanese leveled their colonial sights on Korea and Taiwan. The Americans were part of this larger colonial assault on Asia in the 19th century.

The French were aware of the strategic importance of their Vietnamese colony in this wider imperial competition. In the early twentieth century, they finished building the deep-water port of Cam Ranh Bay, located off the southeastern coast of Vietnam. Russian warships dispatched from the Baltic to stop Japanese colonial expansion into China and Korea gathered there before being defeated by the Japanese in 1905 à Tsushima. Following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt closely followed Japanese movements down the Chinese coastline and imposed an embargo on Tokyo as Japanese imperial troops started occupying Vietnam in 1940. His fears of a wider Japanese thrust into the Indian Ocean via Vietnam were well founded. In early 1942, having attacked Pearl Harbor a few weeks earlier, the Japanese occupied all of Vietnam and then concentrated their ships in Cam Ranh Bay before attacking Southeast Asia and striking as far as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Created that same year in Australia, the American 7th Fleet attacked and began rolling back the Japanese empire until the end of the war in August 1945. The American navy replaced the Japanese navy that year. It controls the Pacific and Indian Oceans to this day.

Following the Chinese communist victory in 1949, American presidents of all political colors (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) were convinced that if Vietnam fell to the communists, it would allow the Soviets and the Chinese to march across the region much as the Japanese had done before them. The famous domino theory did not appear out of thin air because Eisenhower evoked it in 1954 when speaking of the possible defeat of French troops at Dien Bien Phu. And despite their disdain for French colonial rule over Vietnam, from 1950 (as the Korean War got underway just to the north), the Americans increased their support of the French in Indochina in order to contain the spread of communism. The 7th Fleet first called on Vietnam in 1950 to reassure the French of American backing.

When the French withdrew from their war with Ho Chi Minh and agreed to divide Vietnam, like Korea, into a communist north led by Ho and a non-communist South, the Americans accepted but switched their support to an anticommunist Vietnamese leader for the South named Ngo Dinh Diem. As long as this man did not undermine America’s wider strategic goal of containing Eurasian communism, things could continue as they had with the French. But they didn’t and when Diem’s draconian policies in the countryside (land reform, strategic hamlets, and repression) seemed to play into the communist hands the Americans supported his overthrow in 1963. However, when stability still remained elusive, President Lyndon Johnson had to either get out of Vietnam for good or intervene directly. He decided to send in US ground troops in early 1965 while the US navy stationed the bulk of its forces in Cam Ranh Bay.

Ironically, the American withdrawal from the country in April 1975 in no way diminished its geopolitical importance as a new set of ‘great powers’ were already competing with each for influence in the world – the Soviets and the Chinese. Having broken ideologically and violently with the Soviets since the late 1960s, the Chinese worried that their communist brethren in Hanoi would join the Soviets to help encircle them from the south (the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and accelerated its naval expansion into the Pacific via Vladivostok). The Chinese threw their weight behind the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, whose leaders were virulently opposed to the Vietnamese, communist or not. The Vietnamese turned to the Soviets, signed a security treaty in 1978, including the lease of Cam Ranh Bay to the Soviets, before overthrowing the Khmer Rouge later that year. China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, travelled to the United States to win over American support of a project to teach Vietnam a lesson for this “betrayal.” In early 1979, the Chinese sent troops into Vietnam in what was the first war among communists in world history. Significantly, thanks to their access to Cam Ranh Bay, the Soviets projected their naval power deep into Southeast Asia for the first time ever in world history.

The crumbling of the Soviet empire and its European satellites by 1991 profoundly altered the geopolitical calculus, but not the strategic importance of Vietnam. With the Soviets and their navy gone, the Chinese have for the first time since recalling their armadas in 1433 begun reasserting their influence into the Indian Ocean, taking, claiming, and even building islands. Given that the war among Asian communists in the late 1970s put to rest any notion of an operational communist bloc or alliance, Vietnamese communists have now entered into negotiations with the Americans, Japanese, Europeans and anyone else who can help them deal with the resurgence of Chinese naval power despite relying on Chinese communist models for economic renovation and continued single-party rule.

The Americans share the Vietnamese desire to contain the Chinese naval thrust into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. And this is why President Obama, like Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before him, travelled to Vietnam. The Americans still ‘need’ Vietnam and the Vietnamese need them. Why? Because Vietnam is in the middle of that area where American control of the Indian and Pacific Oceans dating from WWII bumps up against the Eurasian continent and a Chinese empire increasingly willing to challenge the American naval hold over Asian waters. Little wonder talks have already begun allowing American vessels to use the Vietnamese naval facilities of Cam Ranh Bay. Vietnam continues to find itself perched upon one of the globe’s most dangerous geopolitical fault lines.

 

[Carlosa]

Some people think that Trump is not very interested in Asia affairs and that he will not confront China and therefore, Vietnam should get closer to China, but the following article (and his communication with Taiwan's president) seems to indicate otherwise:

Trump unloads on China in Twitter rant
http://nypost.com/2016/12/04/trump-unloads-on-china-in-twitter-rant/
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump launched a Twitter attack on China Sunday, warning Beijing against devaluing its currency and taxing US products in order to “build a massive military complex.”

“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” Trump wrote in two consecutive tweets sent at about 5:30 p.m.

While the second part of the Trump tweet seemed to be talking about an artificial reef the Chinese have built in the South China Sea that can support a military base, it was not clear what Trump was referring to when he wrote about a possible request by China to devalue their currency.

The president-elect has accused the Chinese in the past of currency manipulation.

“China is the big abuser,” Trump said during the campaign calling Beijing and other nations “grand masters at monetary manipulation.”

The tweets came after China lodged a complaint with the US on Saturday because Trump accepted a congratulatory call from the leader of Taiwan.

The call broke nearly 40 years of protocol, in which US presidents have not spoken directly to Taiwanese leaders since China considers Taiwan to be part of its nation.

The tweets also came after a busy flurry of tweets by Trump, which began early Sunday with him warning that US companies moving their factories to Mexico will face “retribution” under his administration.

Fresh off his pre-inaugural victory in keeping 1,000 Carrier jobs in Indianapolis, Trump reiterated a campaign pledge to slap goods imported from Mexico with a 35 percent tariff.
“The U.S. is going to substantialy (sic) reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence, is WRONG!,” the President Elect tweeted in the 6 o’clock hour.

Such a tariff would require congressional approval, but House Speaker Paul Ryan previously fretted Trump’s idea would start a “trade war” with other countries imposing retaliatory higher taxes on US imports.

---------------------

Beijing faces decision on how to respond to Trump's tweets

BEIJING (AP) — With Donald Trump's latest tweets touching on highly sensitive issues, China must decide how to handle an incoming American president who relishes confrontation and whose online statements appear to foreshadow shifts in foreign policy.

China awoke Monday to sharp criticism from Trump on Twitter, days after it responded to his telephone conversation with Taiwan's president by accusing the Taiwanese of playing a "little trick" on Trump.

Trump wrote, "Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete, heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn't tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don't think so!"

That was apparently prompted by China's response to Trump's Friday talk with Tsai Ing-wen, the first time an American president or president-elect had spoken to Taiwan's leader since the U.S. broke off formal diplomatic relations in 1979.

The U.S. and Taiwan retain strong unofficial ties, and the U.S. sells weapons to the self-governing island. But American leaders have for decades avoided any official recognition in deference to China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory — to be captured by force if necessary. Trump's reference in another tweet to Tsai as "the President of Taiwan" was sure to inflame China, which considers any reference to Taiwan having a president as a grave insult.

China's reaction was relatively low-key and seemed to offer Trump a face-saving way out of an apparent blunder by blaming the Taiwanese side. English-language commentaries then appeared in two state-run newspapers known to be used by China's ruling Communist Party leadership to send messages abroad.

"Trump might be looking for some opportunities by making waves," said the Global Times in a Monday editorial headlined, "Talk to Trump, punish Tsai administration."

"However, he has zero diplomatic experience and is unaware of the repercussions of shaking up Sino-US relations," the newspaper said. "It is certain that Trump doesn't want a showdown with China, because it is not his ambition, and neither was it included in his promise to the electorate. He puts out feelers to sound China out and chalk up some petty benefits."

China's response was characteristically coded. But it now faces an incoming president who deals in outspoken tweets, not communiques.

Trump used a platform banned by censors in mainland China to renew several of his criticisms during the U.S. presidential campaign. Some of his arguments aren't true.

Taiwan's official Central News Agency, citing anonymous sources on Saturday, said that Edwin Feulner, founder of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, was a "crucial figure" in setting up communication channels between the sides.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence said Sunday that the phone call shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as a shift in U.S. policy. He shrugged off the attention to the incident as media hype.

"It was a courtesy call," Pence told NBC's "Meet the Press."

Ned Price, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said Trump's conversation does not signal any change to long-standing U.S. policy on cross-strait issues — although some in Taiwan expressed hopes for strong U.S. support from the incoming administration.

In terms of Trump's criticisms, Chinese imports are taxed at standard U.S. rates, while Washington has recently slapped painful punitive tariffs on Chinese steel, solar panels and other goods.

And while China once kept a tight grip on the value of the yuan, also known as the renminbi, it now allows it to trade within a bandwidth 2 percent above or below a daily target set by the People's Bank of China.

The yuan is currently trading at around a six-year low against the dollar. But economists now conclude that the currency is more or less properly valued in relation to the dollar and other foreign currencies. And with economic growth slowing considerably and more Chinese trying to move money out of the country, the government is now spending massively to hold up the yuan's value rather than depressing it as Trump and other critics accuse it of doing. It has also imposed strict controls on Chinese moving money out of the country.

China has built up its military and constructed man-made islands in the South China Sea, and made sweeping territorial claims over almost the entire critical waterway. Those claims were broadly rejected in June by an international tribunal in The Hague.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately comment to Trump's latest comments.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at People's University in Beijing, predicted China would not lash out immediately, but calibrate its response over the next several months after Trump enters the White House.

"Trump's remarks will certainly raise the concerns of Chinese leaders," Shi said. "But at the moment, they will be restrained and watch his moves closely."

___

Associated Press journalist Christopher Bodeen and news researcher Liu Zheng in Beijing contributed to this report.

 

[Viet]

Why Do the Americans Still Need Vietnam and the Vietnamese Need Them?
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164179
by Christopher Goscha

Christopher Goscha is an associate professor of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The author and editor of numerous books on Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and international relations in English and French, he lives in Montreal, Canada. His latest book is Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016).



President Obama’s highly publicized visit to Vietnam in May 2016 reminded us of the important role this small country continues to play in global geopolitics. As the Chinese directly challenge American naval dominance over the Pacific and Indians Oceans, Vietnamese and American strategists have increasingly put their past differences behind them in order to focus on how best to deal with China’s increasingly aggressive claims to the sea, many of its islands, and lanes.

Many observers, especially those opposed to America’s military intervention in Vietnam in the mid-20th century, tend to downplay the geopolitical importance of Vietnam. America had no business getting involved in Vietnam in the first place. The famous ‘domino theory’ justifying American intervention in Vietnam was flawed. The communist threat was overblown from the start. But one doesn’t have to believe in the ‘domino theory’ or take sides for or against American intervention in the ‘Vietnam’ War’ to recognize that Vietnam remains one of these historically coveted areas of the globe where empires go.

The Americans were hardly the first to intervene in Vietnam for geopolitical reasons and they were not the last. Because of its overland connections to Southeast Asia and its maritime opening to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Vietnam has always tempted bigger powers to intervene. The Chinese empire ruled northern Vietnam for almost a thousand years beginning around the second century BCE. As the empire’s southern most province, Vietnam served as a gateway for China’s trade with Indian Ocean markets extending to India and the Middle East. Indeed, much as the Silk Road pulled the Chinese empire towards Eurasia’s interior, the Indian Ocean’s markets drew it towards the south. Chinese trade with the world’s other great empire of that time, Rome, went across the Silk Road the Indian Ocean. It is no accident that Roman coins have been unearthed in today’s southern Vietnam.

The Vietnamese secured their independence in 939, but briefly lost it again to the Chinese in the early fifteenth century as the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) recolonized Vietnam as part of its wider imperial expansion that sent Chinese armadas across the Indian Ocean as far as eastern Africa and the Red Sea. The Mongols had also tried to pass through Vietnam in the 13th century in order to take control of the Spice Islands of today’s Indonesia. The Vietnamese pushed them back by land while the Japanese and Javanese did so by sea. And although the Vietnamese regained their independence from the Ming Chinese in 1427, we often forget that they then pushed their own empire southwards to benefit from trade with the Indian Ocean world dominated until then by the Cham and Khmers.

Following the Chinese recall of its navy from the high seas in 1433, a new set of European imperial powers expanded into the region via the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Spanish and Portuguese followed by the British, French, and Dutch. These Western imperial powers adopted increasingly aggressive policies towards Asia in the nineteenth century when the French colonized Vietnam and the British confiscated Singapore, Burma, and Malaya. Meanwhile, the Americans crossed the Pacific Ocean to take the Philippines from the Spanish while the Japanese leveled their colonial sights on Korea and Taiwan. The Americans were part of this larger colonial assault on Asia in the 19th century.

The French were aware of the strategic importance of their Vietnamese colony in this wider imperial competition. In the early twentieth century, they finished building the deep-water port of Cam Ranh Bay, located off the southeastern coast of Vietnam. Russian warships dispatched from the Baltic to stop Japanese colonial expansion into China and Korea gathered there before being defeated by the Japanese in 1905 à Tsushima. Following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt closely followed Japanese movements down the Chinese coastline and imposed an embargo on Tokyo as Japanese imperial troops started occupying Vietnam in 1940. His fears of a wider Japanese thrust into the Indian Ocean via Vietnam were well founded. In early 1942, having attacked Pearl Harbor a few weeks earlier, the Japanese occupied all of Vietnam and then concentrated their ships in Cam Ranh Bay before attacking Southeast Asia and striking as far as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Created that same year in Australia, the American 7th Fleet attacked and began rolling back the Japanese empire until the end of the war in August 1945. The American navy replaced the Japanese navy that year. It controls the Pacific and Indian Oceans to this day.

Following the Chinese communist victory in 1949, American presidents of all political colors (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) were convinced that if Vietnam fell to the communists, it would allow the Soviets and the Chinese to march across the region much as the Japanese had done before them. The famous domino theory did not appear out of thin air because Eisenhower evoked it in 1954 when speaking of the possible defeat of French troops at Dien Bien Phu. And despite their disdain for French colonial rule over Vietnam, from 1950 (as the Korean War got underway just to the north), the Americans increased their support of the French in Indochina in order to contain the spread of communism. The 7th Fleet first called on Vietnam in 1950 to reassure the French of American backing.

When the French withdrew from their war with Ho Chi Minh and agreed to divide Vietnam, like Korea, into a communist north led by Ho and a non-communist South, the Americans accepted but switched their support to an anticommunist Vietnamese leader for the South named Ngo Dinh Diem. As long as this man did not undermine America’s wider strategic goal of containing Eurasian communism, things could continue as they had with the French. But they didn’t and when Diem’s draconian policies in the countryside (land reform, strategic hamlets, and repression) seemed to play into the communist hands the Americans supported his overthrow in 1963. However, when stability still remained elusive, President Lyndon Johnson had to either get out of Vietnam for good or intervene directly. He decided to send in US ground troops in early 1965 while the US navy stationed the bulk of its forces in Cam Ranh Bay.

Ironically, the American withdrawal from the country in April 1975 in no way diminished its geopolitical importance as a new set of ‘great powers’ were already competing with each for influence in the world – the Soviets and the Chinese. Having broken ideologically and violently with the Soviets since the late 1960s, the Chinese worried that their communist brethren in Hanoi would join the Soviets to help encircle them from the south (the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and accelerated its naval expansion into the Pacific via Vladivostok). The Chinese threw their weight behind the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, whose leaders were virulently opposed to the Vietnamese, communist or not. The Vietnamese turned to the Soviets, signed a security treaty in 1978, including the lease of Cam Ranh Bay to the Soviets, before overthrowing the Khmer Rouge later that year. China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, travelled to the United States to win over American support of a project to teach Vietnam a lesson for this “betrayal.” In early 1979, the Chinese sent troops into Vietnam in what was the first war among communists in world history. Significantly, thanks to their access to Cam Ranh Bay, the Soviets projected their naval power deep into Southeast Asia for the first time ever in world history.

The crumbling of the Soviet empire and its European satellites by 1991 profoundly altered the geopolitical calculus, but not the strategic importance of Vietnam. With the Soviets and their navy gone, the Chinese have for the first time since recalling their armadas in 1433 begun reasserting their influence into the Indian Ocean, taking, claiming, and even building islands. Given that the war among Asian communists in the late 1970s put to rest any notion of an operational communist bloc or alliance, Vietnamese communists have now entered into negotiations with the Americans, Japanese, Europeans and anyone else who can help them deal with the resurgence of Chinese naval power despite relying on Chinese communist models for economic renovation and continued single-party rule.

The Americans share the Vietnamese desire to contain the Chinese naval thrust into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. And this is why President Obama, like Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush before him, travelled to Vietnam. The Americans still ‘need’ Vietnam and the Vietnamese need them. Why? Because Vietnam is in the middle of that area where American control of the Indian and Pacific Oceans dating from WWII bumps up against the Eurasian continent and a Chinese empire increasingly willing to challenge the American naval hold over Asian waters. Little wonder talks have already begun allowing American vessels to use the Vietnamese naval facilities of Cam Ranh Bay. Vietnam continues to find itself perched upon one of the globe’s most dangerous geopolitical fault lines.

there is an interesting map in the article, showing the Han Chinese Dynasty that incorporated the modern day North Vietnam more than 2,000 years ago. why Vietnam? the Chinese invaded and annexed Vietnam in 111 BC because the country stopped paying tribute to the Han emperor. that was a strategic mistake when the leadership of Vietnam rejected vassal status and sought full sovereignty. ok nobody can change history. nevertheless, the map shows China back then had no control over Taiwan, neither Hainan nor South China sea. so when Chinese claim they own the sea, because they were the first who discovered it, that is the most ridiculous lie ever invented.

 

[Viet]

Since we are at it, talking on history. the rulers of Vietnam have seen both Ups and Downs since independence from Chinese rule. especially the last Viet dynasty, the Nguyen. the Nguyen were the one, that brought Vietnam to the largest territorial expansion ever seen in the history, also the one, that surrendered the nation to the hand of a foreigner. the French. anyway all history. I think the most impressive figure of the Nguyen is a women: the empress Nam Phuong, the principal wife of the last Nguyen Emperor Bao Dai.

the National Museum of History displays some of treasures of the Nguyen Dynasty. the most important items: the "golden books", where the Nguyen recorded their great achievements during their rules. written in chinese characters on gold/silber plates