Capitalism Won the Vietnam War

Maybe if we got our ass out of Ukraine there would be a happy ending also? What did Tricky Dick call it? "Peace with honor."

Capitalism Won the Vietnam War

The dominos didn’t topple far or for long, but America still bears costs at home.

By Andy Kessler, WSJ

April 27, 2025 4:49 pm ET

This week will see another Liberation Day—in Vietnam. I walked along the parade route leading to the former Presidential Palace, now Reunification Palace. Artillery guns are lined up along the Saigon River to celebrate the victory on April 30, 1975—50 years ago Wednesday.

In America we remember it differently. As Saigon fell, Operation Frequent Wind evacuated 7,000 Americans and locals. Helicopters ran in 10-minute intervals to the USS Okinawa and other ships in the Seventh Fleet. The last helicopter out—the famous photo you may remember is from the Pittman apartment building the day before—left the U.S. Embassy around 8 a.m., evacuating the last of a Marine Guard.

Later that day, North Vietnamese troops in a Soviet tank, and, with a hint of the future, an identical Chinese knockoff, busted through the gates and liberated the palace, ending the war. It’s well beyond my pay grade to relitigate the Vietnam War, but there are so many lessons.

The first was the damage to America’s national self-esteem. We lost. This was best exemplified in the 1981 movie “Stripes,” with Bill Murray’s character, Winger, saying, “We’re soldiers. But we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1!” Ouch.

This loss of confidence hung over the rest of the 1970s until a raging bull market erased some of the glum. But not all. There is still a lingering anti-American psychosis. A July 2024 Gallup poll found only 41% of respondents were “extremely proud” to be American, near 2020’s all-time low.

Vietnam War protesters (“better red than dead”) are finally aging out of relevance. Think John Kerry, Joan Baez, Jane Fonda. Left in their wake are a liberal media, leftist academia and woke culture. This is changing, albeit slowly. Who will drive sentiment now? TikTok influencers? Help us all.

How we fight wars is radically different. The military draft is long gone, replaced by an all-volunteer army. Success is no longer measured via body counts or tonnage. An estimated 90% of the 7.5 million tons of bombs dropped during the Vietnam War likely missed their target. GPS-guided weapons and cruise missiles have become amazingly accurate, starting with Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. War is now asymmetrical with cellphone-triggered roadside bombs in Iraq and grenades dropped via cheap drones in Ukraine. Even in victory, the postwar is often lost—see Afghanistan.

A major rationale for the Vietnam War was the domino theory—that saving South Vietnam was necessary to halt the spread of communism in the region. That ended up both right and wrong. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were killed after the war ended or put in re-education camps. More than 1.5 million mostly educated Cambodians were killed by the Communist Khmer Rouge’s Pol Pot in the killing fields between 1975-79.

But while today’s Vietnamese government calls itself communist, with hammer-and-sickle flags still flying, Vietnam’s state ownership of everything ended in 1986. The dominos didn’t topple far or for long. Capitalism now rules, and Vietnam is modernizing. The 81-story glass and steel Landmark 81 building sits on a former U.S. Army logistics base. Though I did see fish heads cut off and dishes washed in the street. Vietnam still has a way to go.

Vietnam, with a population of more than 100 million, has tons of factories. Average manufacturing wages are $2 an hour, vs. $6 in China and $29 in the U.S. Everyone in Vietnam seems to have a scooter and a smartphone with WhatsApp—increased living standards as they move up to higher valued layers of our horizontal empire.

The government does own and control mobile-phone services, with plans as cheap as $4 a month. But service is slow and spotty, a generation behind ours—classic capitalism with communist characteristics. Many in Vietnam, unprovoked, told me their biggest worry is “China swallowing up Vietnam.” Another set of dominos?

Our media is different now. The Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive in January 1968 was fierce but eventually repelled. After a visit a month later, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite expressed his doubts about the war: “The only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors.” That helped sour public opinion, as expressed in an apocryphal quote often attributed to Lyndon B. Johnson: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Heroic Hollywood war movies like the “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “The Guns of Navarone” gave way to the anxiety-ridden “Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now.”

Looking back, we won the Tet battle but lost the media and eventually the needless and brutal war. But 50 years later, Vietnam’s economy is mostly capitalist. For one-tenth of our wages, they gladly manufacture American designs—clothes and sneakers (including half of Nike’s shoes) and even Apple AirPods and iPads—in exchange for pieces of paper with Benjamin Franklin’s picture on them. With utmost respect to the 58,220 U.S. troops and countless civilians lost during the Vietnam War, I’d say we won.

Write to kessler@wsj.com.