Al Hunt: Changing Vietnam yearns for closer US embrace

Pham Binh Minh, whose father fought to force the U.S. out of Vietnam, is working fervently to elevate the interest and involvement of his country’s former enemy.

Vietnam wants a U.S. presence for economic reasons and as a balance to China, the regional superpower. Minh is the new foreign minister; his father was part of Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime during the bitter conflict of the 1960s and 1970s; later, he was foreign minister when Vietnam clashed with China.

“One cannot imagine how fast the relationship between the United States and Vietnam has developed,” Minh, 52, says in an interview in Hanoi. “After 16 years of normalization, we’ve come to the stage where we’ve developed the relationship in nearly all aspects.”

While the U.S. hasn’t fully erased the pain of that war, the Vietnamese, who suffered far more, embrace their old adversary. Economic ties between the nations are growing; the U.S. is the largest importer of Vietnamese goods. There are regular military contacts, and this month the two countries signed the first defense pact regarding military medicine.

Last year, Vietnamese officers observed a U.S. military operation aboard a Navy destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, named after two admirals, the father and grandfather of Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was a prisoner of war in Hanoi for six years.