Vietnam FOREIGN RELATIONS
Statue representing Vietnamese and Cambodian solidarity, Prey veng, Cambodia
Courtesy Bill Herod
Lang Son following 1979 Chinese invasion
Courtesy Bill Herod
Ho Chi Minh City poster portrays American and Chinese "aggressors," 1979.
Courtesy Bill Herod
Until the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975,
the VCP considered foreign policy interests to be subordinate to
the overriding issue of national liberation and reunification.
Only with the end of the war did Hanoi turn its full attention to
foreign policy concerns. Among the more pressing were its
relations with Laos, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, the
member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), and the West. Like domestic policy, foreign policy
required the reconciliation of ideology and nationalism.
From an ideological standpoint, the Vietnamese saw themselves
as fulfilling their international socialist duty by defeating a
major "imperialist" enemy and by carrying out a revolution that
could be a model for the Third World. Communist ideology in turn
served Vietnamese nationalism by providing a justification for
the pursuit of its nationalist goals. A Marxist-Leninist
historical view, for example, justified creating an alliance of
the three Indochinese countries because such an alliance was
instrumental in the struggle against imperialism. By the same
reasoning, Hanoi's decision in 1978 to overthrow the Pol Pot
regime in Cambodia was defensible on the grounds that a new
government more closely dedicated to Marxist-Leninist principles
was required in Cambodia in order to reestablish an effective
alliance against imperialism. Ideological and nationalist goals
thus were often interchangeable, and Vietnamese foreign policy
could be construed as serving national interests and
international communism at the same time. In the final analysis,
however, nationalism and national security remained the primary
foreign policy concerns.
Data as of December 1987
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