Risks of comparing Korea, Vietnam

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Donald Kirk

Risks of comparing Korea, Vietnam

Posted : 2023-06-29 16:35

Updated : 2023-06-29 16:35

By Donald Kirk

The legacy of history is unpredictable, erratic, sometimes generous, more often capricious and jeering.

If anybody had told me, when I was a journalist in "South" Vietnam five or six decades ago, visiting the marine press center in Da Nang, the large port city on Vietnam's central coast, that someday a U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier would make a port call, I would have assumed the forecast was based on the U.S. winning the war.

For sure, one would not have imagined that one of America's biggest warships would be welcome if "North" Vietnam were to defeat "South" Vietnam. What could be more ridiculous than the notion of an American aircraft carrier arriving in Da Nang with the full authority and blessing of the Communist rulers of a united Vietnam? I would have shrugged off such an impossible prospect as a ridiculous joke.

But what do you know, the USS Ronald Reagan showed up in Da Nang on a courtesy call intended to show the enduring friendship of the Americans and the Vietnamese, under the thumb of the Communist victors in Hanoi. There it is, as the GIs used to say, in an expression of fatalism, boredom and acceptance of the war as they came to know it in those days when the Americans knew they were not fighting to win.

The turnaround in the sentiments of Vietnam's Communist rulers owes its origins to one overwhelming concern: The fear that China will attempt to hold sway over the whole country as in bygone centuries. Fiercely though they fought the French, the Americans and the American-armed-and-advised "South" Vietnamese, the "North" Vietnamese were always waiting for their showdown with the real imperial masters, the Chinese.

Never mind that the Chinese had armed and equipped the "North" Vietnamese for their anti-colonial and anti-imperial wars. The leaders in Hanoi could never stand for having to bow before them. They are not at all willing for the Chinese to tell them what to do, and they are extremely unhappy about Chinese claims to natural gas and oil deposits beneath the South China Sea.

No, latter-day Vietnam would rather not risk a war with China after a nasty border conflict in early 1979 that ended with the Chinese declaring a victory and going home. Hanoi believes its troops taught the Chinese a lesson. Would the outlook of the American-backed Saigon regime have been much different? Had the Americans and their one-time southern allies fought off the North Vietnamese, it's safe to assume America's friends in Saigon would have been as authoritarian as the government that now rules all of Vietnam from Hanoi.

The fate of Vietnam leads to comparisons with Korea. Scholars have been predicting the demise of the North Korean regime for years, but it never seems to happen even though the North again faces the pestilence of poverty, hunger, and disease. The situation may not be as dire as it was in the 1990s when two million North Koreans are believed to have died, but Kim Jong-un's refusal to back down on his nuclear-and-missile program must be taking a toll. The man will not stop wasting money on costly weapons that by any reasonable standard he cannot afford.

One wonders, 50 or so years from now, how the North-South drama will have played out. Even if Kim dies of diseases associated with obesity, no one dares predict the fall of the Kim dynasty. If he is finally unable to rule, he still has a powerful younger sister, and he has also nurtured an inner circle of high-ranking party leaders who may feud with one another but will agree on the need to perpetuate his legacy.

Prophesying Korea's future is as risky as it would have been to try and predict that of Vietnam. As a correspondent. I visited American aircraft carriers off the coast, where warplanes were catapulting off the decks on bombing missions over "North" and "South" Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese had established base complexes in the jungles, and also bombing portions of the Ho Chi Minh trail network over which Hanoi was shipping men and supplies into the South.

These days several hundred thousand Koreans are in Vietnam, to which South Korea sent a total of 300,000 troops at the behest of the Americans during the Vietnam War. No one could have predicted the presence of so many South Koreans in Vietnam after reports of massacres by South Korean troops.

Nor would anyone be so bold as to predict a happy ending in the perpetual contest for control over both Koreas.

Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) covers the North-South confrontation from both Washington and Seoul.