Thierry Fortin: Nordic troll hunter (ret) retweetledi
After the war ended, the United States imposed an economic embargo on Vietnam.
Not for months.
For nineteen years.
A country that had just survived decades of colonialism and warfare, that had millions dead, millions more injured, a landscape soaked in chemical poison, an economy destroyed, that country was then subjected to an American embargo designed to prevent it from recovering.
They couldn't defeat us with bombs. So they tried to starve us with sanctions.
The logic was the same logic that drives every sanctions regime today:
If we can make life hard enough for the people of this country, they will turn on their government and accept the order we want to impose on them.
It didn't work. It never works the way they intend.
What it does is make ordinary people suffer while governments adapt and find alternatives.
Vietnam adapted.
Vietnam found alternatives.
Vietnam survived the embargo the same way it survived the bombing:
Through patience.
Through endurance.
Through a stubbornness that has no good translation in English but is embedded in the DNA of a people who have been resisting foreign control for two thousand years.
In 1994, after nineteen years, the United States lifted the embargo.
Not because of moral reflection.
Not because of an apology or a reckoning.
Because American businesses wanted access to Vietnamese markets.
Commerce accomplished what conscience could not.
That is its own kind of indictment.
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