50 years later, the failed ‘Paris peace’ recalls the danger of courting communist China

We’re marking an anniversary this week. It has been half a century since President Nixon ordered “the Christmas bombing” of Hanoi to get “North Vietnam” to agree to a phony peace agreement under which the Americans would withdraw the last of their troops from “South Vietnam” and both sides would cease fire in place. That is, the Saigon government would control the urban areas while the “North” Vietnamese remained where they were in much of the rest of the country.

The Paris peace accord, of course, was ridiculous. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said he had achieved “peace with honor” with Hanoi, but South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu knew the “peace” was a sellout. North Vietnamese troops, armed and equipped by China, would take over the country while the South Vietnamese, no longer supported by the Americans, would face defeat — and that happened in 1975.

One reason Kissinger, and then Nixon, fell for this deal was their infatuation with China. Kissinger went to Beijing on two secret missions in 1971. The objective was to reverse the policy under which the United States and “Red China,” as China was known in those days, had been enemies ever since Mao Zedong’s “Red army” roared to epic victory over the “Nationalist” forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949.

There were, to be sure, other considerations. The Americans, not just anti-war protesters, were fed up with a war that we were not fighting to win. GI morale, as I observed it as a reporter in Vietnam in those days, was at an all-time low. Drugs were available everywhere, and incidents of “fragging” — assaulting officers with fragmentation grenades — were not uncommon. Protests broke out on college campuses everywhere and on the streets of just about every American city.

For Nixon and Kissinger, the challenge was to get out while saving face. Nixon’s predecessors, John F. Kennedy and then especially Lyndon Johnson, had been all for what appeared as a patriotic war that we could win. The 1968 Tet offensive resulted in devastating losses for the North Vietnamese and their southern front, the Viet Cong, but a much greater loss of will for Americans, suddenly made aware that the big talk, notably from “Westy,” Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of more than a half-million U.S. troops in South Vietnam, was hollow hype.

Nixon and Kissinger had a goal of changing the entire direction of American thinking. Nixon followed up on Kissinger’s China openings with his highly publicized mission to Beijing in July 1972, even as Kissinger was negotiating with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho in Paris. The United States had chosen to give top priority to relations with China while undermining the Thieu government in Saigon.

For a number of years after Nixon’s mission, the Americans had kind of a love affair with the Chinese. President Jimmy Carter opened diplomatic relations with China in December 1978, 34 years ago this month. American delegations flew constantly to China, seeing the sights, making deals, widening trade and cultural contacts. I was among them, on a touristic swing to Beijing, Shanghai and Nanking where we heard nothing but good things from both Chinese and Americans. Mao’s “Great Cultural Revolution” was history and China, at the behest of the shrewd Chou Enlai and then of Deng Xiaoping, appeared to have reversed course from the bad old days.

Americans, and much of the rest of the world, have come to realize the era of good feeling between the United States and China is over. We know that China under President Xi Jinping is reverting to a previous era when free speech was banned. Political opposition has never been countenanced, though some fans of the regime liked to think it was almost democratic.

But those days are gone. Now we have to wonder whether America would betray another country, South Korea, in favor of another regime that counts on support from Beijing — namely, North Korea. That appears unlikely. South Korea is not just a vibrant democracy; it has a roaring capitalist economy that’s capable of producing everything, including its own weapons, for all of which South Vietnam relied on the U.S. before the U.S. stopped providing weapons as the North Vietnamese stormed South in early 1975.

The 50th anniversary of the failed “Paris peace” on Vietnam, finally signed in January 1973, after the bombing campaign, should remind us of the danger of China while ignoring a government for which the Americans had been fighting for a decade. Kissinger was so carried away by his own love affair with the Chinese that he did not care what we did for South Vietnam.

Today, China’s aggressive policies again show the futility of courting Chinese leaders at the expense of close allies, notably South Korea and Japan in northeast Asia. No one can count on China to rein in North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. It’s wishful thinking to imagine that Kim won’t order his seventh nuclear test just because China objects. And it is beyond absurd to think the Chinese would not totally support North Korea in a war that no one wants.

In many ways, the cases of North Korea and North Vietnam defy comparison. North Korea is not able to wage a guerrilla war in the South, as North Vietnam did in South Vietnam before sending down its regular troops. North Korea, however, does have weapons that North Vietnam did not.  The North has nuclear warheads and the missiles to send them to targets near and far.

That’s all the more reason to defend the South against China’s resurgent, aggressive leadership that’s a throwback to the one we were courting half a century ago while betraying our South Vietnamese friends in their hours of greatest need.

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 currently is a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea. He is the author of several books about Asian affairs.