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Let's End the Vietnam Embargo
| Article
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10793 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
1,823 Words |
| Author
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Donald K. Emmerson
Donald K. Emmerson is professor of Southeast Asian studies at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |
Thirty years ago, while fighting the Second Indochina War (France had lost the first one), America slapped an embargo on the economy of North Vietnam. When the North Swallowed the South anyway, Washington enlarged the prohibition to cover the whole country. The quarantine lasted through the Third Indochina War between Soviet and Chinese clients in Cambodia.
In and of itself the embargo mattered little. But it worsened the economic damage inflicted on Vietnam by the incompetence of its own leaders; by the hostility of its wartime supplier, China; and by the outright collapse of its last benefactor, the Soviet Union. As either punishment for the deaths of more than 50,000 Americans or a strategy to cut a winner back down to size, the isolation of Vietnam was effective.
But this is 1993. The world has changed faster than our assumptions about it. Coming to terms with new realities means dropping the boycott now. Americans should at long last be able to trade with Vietnam and invest there.
I make this recommendation for five sets of reasons: economic opportunity, declining leverage, regional stability, historical realism, and political timing.
Economic opportunity.
Its 70 million people make Vietnam the second largest country in Southeast Asia. Having tried and failed to make a command economy work, Hanoi's leaders have reversed course. Economic reforms and liberal foreign investment laws are pulling in capital and rekindling growth. The expanding economy and rising incomes are creating major opportunities for trade. Investors are attracted by the high education and low wages of Vietnamese workers, especially now that rapid economic growth in nearby Malaysia and Thailand has raised the price of labor there. (More than 70 percent of Vietnamese children finish secondary school.) Energy resources such as coal and oil together with a long coastline conducive to fishing and shipping make it easier still to see why many American businessmen with Asian experience want to get in on the ground floor of Vietnam's economy, and why they oppose the ban that prevents them from doing so.
Declining leverage.
The boycott is no longer effective. Annually Vietnam sends to or gets from Singapore goods valued at more than $1 billion. In 1992 South Korea's
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