Building International Relations

This piece in the April/May Foreign Service Journal by former U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius highlights the benefits of engaging with partners around the world through the lens of Washington’s relationship with Hanoi. In the last thirty years of normalized relations, for example, our two-way trade has grown from under $800 million in 1995 to $138 billion in 2022.

Today, Vietnamese students on U.S. campuses contribute $1B to the U.S. economy.

We also see the consequences of gutting expertise from our foreign affairs agencies. For example, Joseph McCarthy turbo-charged the mid-century U.S. obsession with communism with his witch hunt for supposed Communists in the State Department.

“By decimating the team of Foreign Service Asia experts—people who would have known about 11 centuries of enmity between Vietnam and China—McCarthy left the State Department unprepared for the coming conflict in Southeast Asia and contributed to the debacle of America’s engagement in the Vietnam War.” 

                                                              Former U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the 80th anniversary of Vietnam’s independence. Osius’s piece plots significant moments in that history and provides a nuanced study of how two societies, one Democratic, the other Communist, can learn from each other for mutual benefit.

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