> After losing nearly 60,000 US service members in an unnecessary war that took a million Vietnamese lives
Completely delusional article. The mass murderer Ho Cho Minh and his cronies took the lives of Vietnamese citizens by the millions, not as implied by the USA.
Reeducation camps of 1-5 years and longer were established after 1975, and anyone suspected of assisting the REPUBLIC of Vietnam (South Vietnam) was incarcerated under ongoing torture and slave labor activity. Many died, many were crippled, some eventually escaped to other countries.
Notable is that the communist Khmer Rouge - which killed upward of 1/3 the Cambodian population (~2-3+ million people) mentored under the butcher Ho Cho Minh.
The leadership of the communist Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge, and the Lao Pathet Lao all studied literally under French communists…. in Paris!!! Ho Cho Minh was the documented co-founder of the French Communist Party in his younger years.
Also delusional is the "good Vietnamese trading partner" myth. This is an explicitly authoritarian and kleptocrat government which imprisons citizens for - get this - criticising the government. There is zero freedom of press (100 percent government controlled), no freedom of speech, Internet control so that services such as Facebook and other western dialog are blocked… the list goes on and on.
The country is currently being sold piecemeal to China, and this is well-known by overseas Vietnamese communities (not to mention Vietnamese citizens themselves). To believe that everything in Vietnam is benign and just ducky is to be radically misinformed. It may be for the upper 5 percent who are under the communist umbrella, but for the remaining 95 percent it is anything but.
Delusional.