America

By Strobe Talbott

According to Lord Palmerston, nations have no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests. That maxim contains a warning the Bush Administration should heed as it deals with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

It has been more than 14 years since the last Americans were lifted off the embassy roof in Saigon, a televised vignette of ignominy that is still replayed in the U.S.'s memory. Now Viet Nam has suffered its own setback: after more than a decade of trying to defeat a rural insurgency in Cambodia, a Vietnamese expeditionary force has given up and gone home.

For years the U.S. has demanded just such a withdrawal as a precondition for the normalization of relations between Washington and Hanoi. Viet Nam hopes that diplomatic recognition by the U.S. and removal of the trade embargo will end its isolation and lead to an influx of Western aid, trade, credits and technology. Many Vietnamese recognize that their political and economic system is a shambles. Some officials admit privately that they can run wars but not countries.

But now the Bush Administration is upping the ante. In addition to pulling out of Cambodia, Viet Nam must contribute to what Washington calls a comprehensive settlement of the civil war the departing occupiers leave behind. By the Administration's definition, that requires the inclusion of the murderous Khmer Rouge in a coalition, along with two non-Communist Cambodian factions and the current Vietnamese-backed rulers in Phnom Penh.

Most of the world condemned the Vietnamese attack on Cambodia in 1978 as an act of aggression. But whatever Hanoi's predatory motives, the invasion had one positive consequence: it ended the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge and drove them into the jungle. There they lurk today, hoping to return to power in the new round of fighting that has become almost inevitable since an international peace conference broke down in Paris in August. )

Washington's tacit backing of the Khmer Rouge may have contributed as much to the diplomatic impasse as did Hanoi's support of its stubborn Cambodian clients. That sad symmetry is beginning to look like the latest blight on America's dismal record in Southeast Asia -- and the Bush Administration's first major foreign policy debacle.

Diplomatic recognition means just what it says, recognizing a government as a fact of life. Yet the Bush Administration seems determined to treat Viet Nam as something different, an object of permanent hostility.

The Vietnamese think they know why. A joke is making the rounds in Hanoi: Viet Nam has done everything it can to lure the Americans to open an embassy there, and nothing has worked; the only option left is to declare war on the U.S., then immediately surrender and count on the beneficence that Americans show those they have defeated.

Whatever blame the Vietnamese bear for the collapse of diplomacy and the prospect of new bloodshed in their region today, they are unquestionably responsible for the only war the U.S. ever lost. "That war cleaves us still," said George Bush in his Inaugural Address. "But, friends, surely the statute of limitations has been reached. The final lesson of Viet Nam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory." Like Palmerston's, those were wise words. But the Administration has yet to apply the lesson to Viet Nam itself.