50 Years After the U.S. Left Vietnam, Another Retreat Is Shaking Asia

Fifty years ago, my father, an American war reporter, climbed over the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and scrambled onto a chopper that took off from a roof in the mission.

“My last view of Saigon was through the tail door of the helicopter,” he wrote in the Chicago Daily News. “Then the door closed — closed on the most humiliating chapter in American history.”

My father believed in the domino theory, how a cascade of Communism might deluge Asia. A veteran of World War II, he wrote a book titled, without much irony, “Not Without the Americans.”

The title seems an anachronism, from a time when paternalistic Americans, confident in their own flawed democracy, envisioned a world shaped in their own image. Half a century after the pullout of the last American troops from Vietnam, it’s clear how Asia is learning to live, if not without the Americans, then with a new great power: China.

Beijing’s imprint is everywhere, from the contested waters of the South China Sea, where delicate coral reefs have been churned up to build Chinese military bases, to remote villages in Nepal, where Chinese goods are flooding markets via Chinese-built roads.

President Trump’s back-and-forth on tariffs, the blunting of American diplomacy and the dismantling of the agency for American aid — and with it hundreds of programs in Asia — feels like yet another withdrawal, and one that was not even compelled by military force.

When an earthquake struck Myanmar in late March, killing more than 3,700 people, the United States was far slower than China in sending assistance. Then it fired American aid workers while they were on the ground there.

“America used to stand for hope and democracy, but now they are missing when we needed them most,” said Ko Aung Naing San, a resident of Sagaing, the earthquake’s devastated epicenter. “China sent help quickly.”

But in his next breath, Mr. Aung Naing San questioned Beijing’s intentions in Myanmar. He worried about China plundering Myanmar’s natural resources and pleaded for the United States to help. When a military junta overthrew the country’s elected leaders four years ago, a pro-democracy resistance begged for America to do something, anything, to repel the dictators.

Washington will not intervene in Myanmar; another Southeast Asian quagmire is the last thing any U.S. administration wants. But American ideals and images, even when its bedrock institutions may be under threat at home, continue to resonate overseas: Hollywood, bluejeans, gauzy notions of freedom.

In March, I interviewed Gen. Chhum Socheat, the deputy defense minister of Cambodia. The United States had helped refurbish parts of a military base there, but the Cambodian government later turned to China instead for a complete modernization. The American construction was razed, and in early April, the Chinese-built facility was unveiled with Chinese military officers in attendance.

As we were walking out of the interview, General Chhum Socheat, who had spent an hour defending Cambodia’s authoritarian leaders, patted my arm gently.

“Your American democracy, it is a little difficult now?” he inquired with surprising concern.

I made an ambiguous noise. He pressed on.

Cambodia, he said, was still recovering from the destruction of the Khmer Rouge years, during which radical Communists razed the society and oversaw the deaths of up to one-fifth of the country’s population.

“We are developing our democracy, like America, but first we need peace and stability,” he said.

I doubt that Cambodia, where a hereditary dictatorship has erased the political opposition and kneecapped free speech, is truly on a democratic trajectory. And one reason that Cambodians embraced the Khmer Rouge in 1975 was a brutal American bombing campaign that spilled over from the Vietnam War.

Still, the deputy defense minister’s reference to American democracy meant something enduring about ideals. General Chhum Socheat said he wished America well, and he urged me to believe, against significant evidence otherwise, that Cambodia wanted to be with the Americans, too.

About 25 years ago, shortly before the previous big anniversary of the Americans’ departure from what is now Ho Chi Minh City, I met with Pham Xuan An, a Vietnamese reporting colleague of my father’s. Uncle An, as he instructed me to call him, sat at a cafe where foreign correspondents, spies and the occasional novelist like Graham Greene used to sip thick coffees sweetened with condensed milk.

He breathed raggedly from emphysema, the same smoking-related disease that had killed my father years before. Uncle An wore a big watch on his thin wrist, a gift from my father, he said.

“Mr. Beech was a patriot,” he said, pronouncing the word in the French way.

Uncle An, too, was a patriot. He worked as a correspondent for Time magazine, but secretly held the rank of colonel in the North Vietnamese Army, sending intelligence to the Communists by invisible ink. He believed that Vietnam should strive for true independence, not be a pawn in an imperial game.

Despite his years of loyal spying, Uncle An may have been tainted by his long association with Americans. His career in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam never quite reached the heights he had hoped. His son studied in the United States, just as he had once, then returned home.

One day in the closing days of the Vietnam War, Uncle An told me, my father had wanted to go to a battlefield. A former U.S. Marine, my father was drawn to the trenches, filled with young men drafted into a war that was already curdling into a byword for American defeat. Uncle An told my father to go somewhere else.

That day, the North Vietnamese attacked the place my father had not gone on Uncle An’s advice. My father lived while American soldiers died.

“I like Americans,” Uncle An said.