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Keith Wheelock's avatar

As a Foreign Service Officer with Congo-burnished credentials for operating in ‘sticky’ situations, I twice (1965 & 1967) refused an ‘invitation’ from our ambassador in Saigon to join him. Then it was clear to me that there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

We were engaged against virulent nationalism and Ho, a patriotic leader, while there was a government merry go round in Saigon. This Greek tragedy ended with President Johnson not running for re-election, tens of thousands of dead Americans, and millions of dead Vietnamese.

Back then who could have imagined that an American president would be visiting the Ho Chin Minh palace and be cementing a strategic alliance with Vietnam against China (historically an enemy of Vietnam)?

Of course, growing up in World War II, I was taught to hate the Japanese and the Germans, who, not long after the end of WW II, became vital American allies.

One of the few constants in recent history is that Russia under Putin and China under Xi I would consider irreversible enemies.

I applaud President Biden for his effective strategy in Asia.

I also salute him for honoring John McCain, who served his country nobly. That Bone Spur Donald denigrated Senator McCain by declaring that ‘he didn’t consider a hero a person who was captured’ and Lindsay Graham took a 180 degree turn against his once-close-friend McCain highlights the duplicity of Trumpublicans.

Senator McCain, while dying of cancer, made a heroic effort to come to the Senate and preserve Obamacare with his vote. I consider McCain an American hero.

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TCinLA's avatar

I don't think we need to worry about the Vietnamese and Chinese - they've not-so cordially hated each other ever since the Han ran the ancestors of the Vietnamese out of South China in around 2,000 B.C., a little fact all the New Frontiersmen geniuses were unaware of back in the day that might have changed a lot had they had the brains to have brains and find out. Too bad FDR didn't live to carry out his post-war colonial policy: the European imperialists denied return to their southeast Asian colonies, the US working with the former colonies to bring them to independence. The Vietnamese were the only Southeast Asians not to welcome the Japanese kicking the French out, the way the Burmese and Malayans and Indonesians welcomed the British and Dutch getting kicked out, and they were our only indigenous allies during the war. Most people don't know that the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence is ours, with a few editorial word changes regarding locality. Had we recognized them in 1946, the situation today would likely be what it is, except 58,000 of my brothers and sisters would have lived to see old age, along with their kids and grandkids - and an untold millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians would have gotten the same break.

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