Vietnam War and the Rise of the State: The Legacy of Mr. Kissinger in the U.S.-Coamen Campaign for the Restoration of Democracy in Southeast Asia
As secretary of state and national security adviser under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Mr. Kissinger created U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia. His expansion and escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia killed, wounded or displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. That legacy still reverberates, and not just in bombed and brutalized Cambodian villages. His disregard for civilian casualties in war established a blueprint for the projection of U.S. military power that would have deadly consequences for civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, among other places.
The normalization of U.S.-China ties in 1979 elevated China’s international standing and paved the way for its rise, said Duong Quoc Chinh, 46, a Vietnamese architect and political commentator in Hanoi, the capital. “Now people dislike him because they think he is responsible for China’s prosperity.”
The fighting between North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam did not end until the North’s victory in 1975. According to Mr. Kissinger, the result of the cynical American policy to create space in the country was 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. “They could not have had a settlement, except for selling out and withdrawing unconditionally, which nobody would have supported.”
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.
Prime Minister Hun Sen, who spent over 30 years in power, had argued that Mr. Kissinger should be charged with war crimes because of his 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. “I surmise that they cannot blame someone whose name they do not know,” he said.
TheVietnamese Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to the request about Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. Pen Bona, a spokesman for the Cambodian government, declined to comment.
The relationship between the US and Mr. Hun Sen’s government deteriorated due to his backsliding on democracy. At the same time, Mr. Hun Sen brought Cambodia closer to China, calling it his country’s “most trustworthy friend.”
Vietnam is trying to counterbalance a historically close relationship with China by building 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 killing of innocents in Afghanistan and the air wars: How innocent civilians were killed in the trenches when terrorists were shot?
For instance, it took a New York Times investigation in 2021 to force the Pentagon to admit that a strike against a suspected terrorist target in Kabul, Afghanistan, actually killed 10 civilians, seven of them 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. No Americans from soldiers in the field to officials in the White House were held accountable for the hundreds of innocent Cambodians who were killed.