“These early workers for reconciliation included military veterans who served in the war, and Vietnamese whose families suffered division and displacement to America.” “The seeds of U.S.-Vietnamese reconciliation were planted not so much by governments as by ordinary people who had in one way or another directly suffered the traumas of the war,” notes Andrew Wells-Dang, who leads USIP’s peacebuilding initiative between the United States and Vietnam. Ambassador John Negroponte noted in the USIP panel discussion, but “we have certainly come a long way” in rebuilding U.S.-Vietnamese relations. “We may have started a bit late,” former U.S. After fighting ended, the United States and Vietnam needed 20 years, until 1995, to open normal diplomatic relations. troops and prisoners of war - and two more years of combat before North Vietnamese forces defeated the U.S.-allied South Vietnam. withdrawal … in what was thought to be a face-saving way.” The accord produced the return to America of U.S. Rather, it “was an agreement to cover U.S. The formally titled “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam” achieved neither goal, historian Carolyn Eisenberg noted in a recent public discussion at USIP. and Vietnamese veterans have led reconciliation work in decades since, notably in searching for remains of those killed in the war. troops guard North Vietnamese prisoners in 1965, early in the Vietnam War. In the face of seemingly intractable wars - in Ukraine, Afghanistan, the eastern Congo basin, Yemen or elsewhere - the growing U.S.-Vietnamese relationship shows that even a peace that seems impossible today can indeed be built for our children. Thus, the accords permitted, a half-century later, what is now a durable American-Vietnamese reconciliation. and Vietnamese diplomats in Paris ceremoniously signed “peace accords” that did not end the Vietnam War, but that achieved America’s withdrawal from it.
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