President Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine takes me back to 60 years ago, when I first set foot in Vietnam as a journalist after covering the end of the era of anti-Americanism in Indonesia and the downfall of Sukarno.
In the face of corruption, destructive political rivalries and the failure of U.S.-advised South Vietnamese forces, the Americans were having a deeper impact on the Vietnamese than many realized. It was not that “we are winning,” as U.S. commanders claimed, but that American influence pervaded every corner of the culture of what we then called South Vietnam to differentiate it from the perceived enemy, North Vietnam.
As I flew in and out of Vietnam on extended visits from Hong Kong and then Tokyo, then spent a couple of years writing a book in the venerable Hotel Majestic overlooking the Saigon River, I came to realize how much the Vietnamese not only counted on their American ally and benefactor but also how they trusted us. Whatever journalists might write on the horrors of the war, the disruption of civilized life and the unlikelihood of a happy ending, millions of South Vietnamese depended on the American forces in their midst.
That’s why it came as such an incredible shock when the Americans cut and ran 50 years ago, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves against the North Vietnamese.
Who would have thought the Americans — big and rich, arrogant and often ignorant as they were — would not come to their rescue as the North Vietnamese poured southward, taking over town after town, base after base, until the fall of the Saigon regime on April 30, 1975? About 3 million people from South Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos fled over the next two decades — hundreds of thousands on fishing boats. Tens of thousands of them died.
Likewise, as many as 2.8 million Cambodians were killed during more than three years of Khmer Rouge rule after the U.S. stopped showering the Phnom Penh regime with military aid and stopped the air support that had held the Khmer Rouge at bay.
It is easy to rationalize all this suffering by saying the Americans should never have plunged into the war there in the first place. A significant number of Americans were anti-war — many sympathetic with the communist government in Hanoi. And the American bug-out ranks as the most humiliating defeat in American history until now. It set the pattern for debacles in which U.S. forces have withdrawn, fled or yielded to the enemy when politicians willing to compromise with foes at home and abroad tired of waging war.
That’s essentially what Trump has been doing in Ukraine: begging his friend, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, for negotiations that would sanctify Russia’s gains — and set the stage for the next phase of a struggle in which the Russians would fight to take over all Ukraine, as they did during Tsarist rule and again during the communist era, with Joseph Stalin grabbing Ukraine’s rich agricultural products, notably wheat, leaving millions to die.
Ever since the defeat of the old Saigon regime, we’ve been facing more compromise and more defeat. As the winners of two world wars, having defended the southern “half” of the Korean peninsula against North Korean and Chinese onslaughts, the U.S. has suffered setbacks in just about every significant conflict in which our presidents have invested arms or lives. Vietnam may rank as our worst total defeat, but we can’t say we haven’t lost a few since then.
We are still living with the aftermath of George W. Bush’s decision to order American forces into Iraq in 2003, overthrowing Saddam Hussein. I arrived in Baghdad in June 2004 on the day Bush transferred “sovereignty” to a Baghdad regime that could hardly survive without the infusion of more than 100,000 American troops plus air support and arms. Now the regime is left with 2,000 or so U.S. military advisers offering clues on how to survive against its Iran-backed foes and remnants of the Islamic State.
Trump, in a foretaste of what he’s doing to Ukraine, abandoned the Kurds in southern Turkey and Syria to the mercies of the Turks during his first presidency. Next, though he loudly denies it, Trump shares responsibility with his much maligned successor, former President Joe Biden, for abandoning the Afghan regime that the U.S. had been defending for a decade. First, Trump pulled about 10,000 American troops out of Afghanistan and then made a deal with the Taliban to withdraw American support. As with his effort at bullying Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky into compliance, so he overlooked the former Afghan government. Trump loves to blame Biden for the fiasco of the American pullout in August 2021, but Trump had already decided the war was over for the U.S.
It would be nice to rationalize America’s decisions, from Vietnam onward, to cut and run as necessary or inevitable, but we see the same scenario playing out in Ukraine. The war, as fought with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of American arms and ammunition, is not likely to end well — at least, as far as Trump is concerned — so why not make a deal with Putin? Trump may claim that he’s getting Putin to agree to settle for what the Russians have already carved out in the eastern and southeastern Donbas region, as well as Crimea, but we must assume Putin wants the rest of the country too — and will fight to get it on some spurious pretext.
Of course, there’s always the possibility this was all a negotiating strategy, to bring Zelensky to the table — and it may be working. Officials say Ukraine and the U.S. will be meeting on Friday in D.C. to discuss a “natural resources deal” that could “part of future security guarantees.”
After Ukraine, Trump will face still more challenges, but it’s questionable if he will reverse the trend. What if China’s President Xi Jinping finally decides to take on the independent island state of Taiwan, 90 miles from the mainland at the closest point? Or, what if Xi wants to attack the Philippines from bases the Chinese have built in the South China Sea, which China says is all theirs? Trump may make a show of challenging the Chinese in a terrible trade war, but we can be pretty sure that he would not order a strong defense of either Taiwan, which Biden assured we’re “committed” to defend, or the Philippines, with which Biden strengthened our alliance.
For that matter, what about South Korea? Would Trump be likely to wage a second Korean War to protect it again? North Korea’s hereditary dictator, Kim Jong Un, grandson of Kim Il Sung, founder of the regime that’s now a “nuclear power,” as Trump has called it, today threatens our side with much worse devastation. Trump has repeated traditional calls for “Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear program, but he’s been “in love” with Kim ever since their first summit in Singapore in June 2018. Let us not forget that he spoke during his first term of withdrawing most of America’s 28,500 troops from the South, playing into Kim’s strategy for reuniting the Korean peninsula on his own harsh terms.
Kim’s new relationship with Putin, to whom he is providing arms and troops, may pave the way for another Trump-Kim summit, if Trump forces a deal with Putin on Ukraine while excluding Ukraine’s president from the process. Then look for Trump, after putting on a tough-guy show on slashing China’s enormous trade surplus with the U.S., to kowtow before China’s president, promising they would do “everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!” Those words, eerily similar to his praise for Putin, don’t foretell a stout defense of America’s Asian friends against Chinese bullying and worse.
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.
