Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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McCain has pressed for normalization even though some veterans' lobbies have vilified him as "the Manchurian Candidate." The former POW voices an argument that is not widely understood in the U.S.: Vietnam today is valuable as a strategic counterbalance to China. Hanoi has just joined as a fully paid-up member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a bloc of such countries as Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines that banded together in 1967 under the threat of Vietnam's conflagration and China-aided communist insurgencies. These neighbors, edgy of late about China's new military strength, see Vietnam...
American business, which is solidly behind rapprochement, will not get much from it beyond what Clinton's lifting of the trade embargo achieved last year. The real fruits would come from giving Vietnam most-favored-nation trading status. Still, the Vietnamese seem eager to plow ahead. Said Deac Jones of Connell Bros. Co., a distributor of U.S. consumer goods in Vietnam: "The majority of people here are very pro-American. If you have the exact same brand product, a shampoo made in the U.S. and the Philippines, they will pay more...
...course. The fact that America lost a cause draped in the noblest rhetoric but fought on cynical and divisive terms produced a sense of lingering self-doubt that may never vanish. In a significant way, though, the principles for which the war was waged are ascendant today in Vietnam. The free-market spirit of Saigon is what counts, not the Marxist maunderings of some old men in Hanoi. The Vietnamese, who lost many more lives than Americans did along the streets, rivers and paddy fields of a singularly ugly encounter, have put the past behind them. Americans need...
...territorial disputes over the Spratly Islands. A CIA report last May said China might deserve sanctions because it sold ballistic-missile components to Iran and Pakistan. The U.S. is holding up China's application for membership in the World Trade Organization. And the U.S. recognition last week of Vietnam, China's neighbor and frequent enemy, fuels Beijing's fears that Washington has malign strategic intentions...
Saying the time had come to "bind up our own wounds," President Clinton extended full diplomatic relations to Vietnam on the unanimous recommendation of his top advisers and with the backing of key legislators, including Republican Senator John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran and former POW. Normalization, said Clinton, would further U.S. diplomatic and economic interests and facilitate an accounting of Americans still missing in action. The American Legion, mia groups and many Republicans, among them Senate majority leader Bob Dole, protested...