Kissinger’s Legacy Still Connected to Vietnam and Cambodia

The International Relations Between Vietnam and the United States: The Legacy of a Successive American Policy in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Emergence of the Communist Party

Mr. Kissinger helped establish diplomatic relations between the United States and China, which some people in Vietnam dislike.

The fact that those reforms were initiated by Deng Xiaoping, the same Chinese leader who ordered the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, speaks to the ambiguous nature of Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. On the other hand, improved standards of living for the Chinese people was a result of the U.S.-China rapprochement. On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the principal geopolitical adversary of the United States and the vanguard of the authoritarian trend in global politics, putting a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and threatening to invade Taiwan, whose status was left unresolved by Mr. Kissinger’s diplomacy.

The fighting between the U.S. and South Vietnam started in 1969 and didn’t end until 1975. Some observers have said that was the inevitable result of a cynical American policy intended to create space — “a decent interval,” as Mr. Kissinger put it — between the American withdrawal from the country in 1973 and the fall of Saigon two years later.

“America should not torture itself on the view that it could have had a settlement earlier if their presidents had been more willing,” Mr. Kissinger said during a 2016 event at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Nobody would have supported the settlement because they would have sold out and withdrawn.

As for the bombing campaign, he wrote in his memoirs that it was a decision North Vietnam’s actions had forced upon President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.

In postwar Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who spent nearly four decades in power before transferring the premiership to his son this year, long argued that Mr. Kissinger and other former American officials should be charged with war crimes for their role in the bombing campaign.

Many analysts have said that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led in part to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which oversaw horrors that killed nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population in the late 1970s.

But Mr. Sophal Ear, who escaped the Khmer Rouge as a child, added that Mr. Kissinger was slowly fading from memory in a country where the median age is now only about 27. He thinks that they can’t blame someone who they don’t know.

The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. Pen Bona, a spokesman for the Cambodian government, declined to comment.

The interviews and documents showed that the White House neglected to assess the impact of military actions on Cambodian lives and failed to investigate alleged abuses. They contributed to a national security mindset where the U.S. military frequently cast ordinary people as enemy combatant, excused civilians deaths and injuries as regrettable but unavoidable and failed to punish those responsible. This template has been followed in America’s more recent forever wars.

Vietnam has been trying to offset its complicated relationship with China with warmer ties with the United States. Though a one-party state, Vietnam has found common ground with Washington in concerns over China’s mounting ambitions in Southeast Asia.

The U.S. should not be responsible for civilian casualties in Cambodia I (the New York Times, The Intercept, 2021)

In the case of the strike in Afghanistan, it took a New York Times investigation in 2021 to force the Pentagon to admit that they had killed 10 civilians and seven children. Another Times investigation that same year revealed that the air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocents. My investigation for The Intercept found that no Americans — from soldiers in the field to officials in the White House, chief among them Mr. Kissinger — are known to have been held accountable for the hundreds of civilian casualties in Cambodia I documented.