TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.019

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.5 KB | 75 lines

                ╘                                                              WORLD, Page 42

America Abroad

The Debacle Deepens


By Strobe Talbott


    According to Lord Palmerston, nations have no permanent
allies or enemies, only permanent interests. That maxim contains
a warning the Bush Administration should heed as it deals with
the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

    It has been more than 14 years since the last Americans
were lifted off the embassy roof in Saigon, a televised vignette
of ignominy that is still replayed in the U.S.'s memory. Now
Vietnam has suffered its own setback: after more than a decade
of trying to defeat a rural insurgency in Cambodia, a
Vietnamese expeditionary force has given up and gone home.

    For years the U.S. has demanded just such a withdrawal as
a precondition for the normalization of relations between
Washington and Hanoi. Vietnam hopes that diplomatic recognition
by the U.S. and removal of the trade embargo will end its
isolation and lead to an influx of Western aid, trade, credits
and technology. Many Vietnamese recognize that their political
and economic system is a shambles. Some officials admit
privately that they can run wars but not countries.

    But now the Bush Administration is upping the ante. In
addition to pulling out of Cambodia, Vietnam must contribute to
what Washington calls a comprehensive settlement of the civil
war the departing occupiers leave behind. By the
Administration's definition, that requires the inclusion of the
murderous Khmer Rouge in a coalition, along with two
non-Communist Cambodian factions and the current
Vietnamese-backed rulers in Phnom Penh.

    Most of the world condemned the Vietnamese attack on
Cambodia in 1978 as an act of aggression. But whatever Hanoi's
predatory motives, the invasion had one positive consequence:
it ended the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge and drove them
into the jungle. There they lurk today, hoping to return to
power in the new round of fighting that has become almost
inevitable since an international peace conference broke down
in Paris in August.

    Washington's tacit backing of the Khmer Rouge may have
contributed as much to the diplomatic impasse as did Hanoi's
support of its stubborn Cambodian clients. That sad symmetry is
beginning to look like the latest blight on America's dismal
record in Southeast Asia -- and the Bush Administration's first
major foreign policy debacle.

    Diplomatic recognition means just what it says, recognizing
a government as a fact of life. Yet the Bush Administration
seems determined to treat Vietnam as something different, an
object of permanent hostility.

    The Vietnamese think they know why. A joke is making the
rounds in Hanoi: Vietnam has done everything it can to lure the
Americans to open an embassy there, and nothing has worked; the
only option left is to declare war on the U.S., then immediately
surrender and count on the beneficence that Americans show those
they have defeated.

    Whatever blame the Vietnamese bear for the collapse of
diplomacy and the prospect of new bloodshed in their region
today, they are unquestionably responsible for the only war the
U.S. ever lost. "That war cleaves us still," said George Bush
in his Inaugural Address. "But, friends, surely the statute of
limitations has been reached. The final lesson of Vietnam is
that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a
memory." Like Palmerston's, those were wise words. But the
Administration has yet to apply the lesson to Vietnam itself.