Nixon in China, Clinton in Vietnam

What a sense of humor history sometimes has. Smack in the middle of the Cold War, Richard Nixon, a man who built a career running down practically anyone who had anything to do with China, pops up in Beijing to exchange toasts with the Chicoms. In retrospect you have to laugh.

Look now at Bill Clinton, who is not unfamous for hiding behind Oxford’s skirts during the only war America has ever lost (he is also not unfamous for not inhaling during this same period). Had I been his Machiavelli, I probably would have advised my prince to dodge Vietnam as an issue. After all, some people just might recall that at the very time that the young Clinton at Oxford was merrily gathering his Rhodes buds, Hanoi was sending a lot of brave young American boys to their graves.

One heroic American survivor of that horrible period was Pete Peterson, a retired Air Force colonel and now a retiring Florida congressman. While the ambitious young Clinton was beginning to plot his road to the White House, the young bomber pilot was downed in combat and spent 6 1/2 years in a communist cell. History now provides another ironic twist: Peterson is Clinton’s nominee to be the first U.S. ambassador to communist Vietnam. Suppressing a chuckle but not a Machiavellian note of approval, I say “bravo”--and imagine Dick Nixon winking from that Great Hall of the People in the sky.

I think Hanoi senses this, too. In Clinton they see a man they can do business with. Heck, they see a man anyone can do business with. The Hanoi Politburo took note of how Beijing wooed American businessmen to lean on Bob Dole and other Republicans to support Clinton’s decision to maintain Beijing’s trade status. (Communists sure have grown to love American businessmen.) So some years ago the Vietnamese began luring business from other nations--especially Taiwan and Australia--while America was still malaising over its lost war. Fearful of being left out, American businesses launched a lobbying campaign in Washington for better relations with communist Vietnam. It worked.

But will relations really normalize? Vietnam, about the size of California and with a population of 72 million people, has a government that fluctuates from letting a thousand entrepreneurs bloom to reasserting centralized communist command and control over the economy. It won’t be an easy path, but for California and the West, with geographical proximity and ethnic ties to the Asia-Pacific market, the payoff from good relations could prove awesome. Just ask our Australian friends about that. Their investment in Vietnam, climbing toward the $1- billion mark, exceeds that of any North American or European country. This didn’t just happen. Over the years a substantial influx of Vietnamese, now numbering about 140,000, was permitted to relocate into Australia’s major cities. As a consequence the number of Australians studying Asian languages has soared (in fact, the country’s magnet schools teach Australian children many of the Asian languages) And so now lots of Vietnamese-speaking Australians are on the ground in Vietnam, getting in while the opportunities are ripe.

Not only has Australia done as well in Asia-fying itself as any Anglo country can, it has garnered worldwide respect for its burgeoning academic scholarship on Southeast Asia. These competence-building measures were all very deliberate. “During the 1980s, we always tried to keep a dialogue going with Hanoi without, of course, breaking ties with the West,” John McCarthy, Australian ambassador to the United States, explained to me last week while visiting Los Angeles. “We had a policy of engagement long before others were doing it. We got into Vietnam as early as we could after the war.” Remember that the Aussies lost a lot of soldiers in that war, too.

McCarthy, who served as Australia’s ambassador to Vietnam from 1981 to 1983, is too much the diplomat to criticize America’s still-developing (a diplomatic way of putting it) Asia policy: “We need to see more recognition in U.S. foreign policy of the enormous significance of Asia. We’d like to see America putting at least as much interest in Asia as in Europe. We believe that the beginning part of the 21st century will be defined by the rise of East Asia.”

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Clinton, with his special relationship with Vietnam, turns out to be just the man for this job, just as Nixon was for China? Sometimes in history the man who seems all wrong for the situation winds up the very one who gets the job done. Vietnam may be one of those situations. And I can say this without laughing. Almost.

* Tom Plate’s column runs Tuesdays. His e-mail address is <tplate@ucla.edu>.