Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "What Makes Vietnam a Valuable US Ally? || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. I don’t know if that would have been possible until much later, given the dynamics of the Cold War. I’m not saying our policy was a good one (obviously it wasn’t), but the Soviets had their hooks into Vietnam. Vietnam was answerable to Moscow, if not quite a puppet. The mutually beneficial relationship only became a possibility after the fall of the Soviet Union, although there was some tentative rapprochement in the 80s.
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  2. A politburo is infinitely more desirable than a single dictator who has crushed all possible dissent and differing opinions. Compared to Xi’s authoritarian rule that quashes all debate, Vietnam is relatively a democracy because it allows different opinions, albeit within a very narrow range. A politburo atop a democracy gets things done via compromise among political factions and consensus development. As crazy as this might sound to our democratic ears, the internal factions work as a system of checks and balances. If any faction becomes too powerful, the other factions will work together to undermine and limit that power. A second reason that a politburo rule by committee is preferable to a Xi-style dictatorship is that you have more eyes looking at problems and challenges. There’s a better chance that the leadership has a grasp on the reality of a situation, whether the situation is internal or geopolitical. Lower level bureaucrats and functionaries can’t fudge the data (to keep the dictator happy) to the same degree as has happened in the PRC since Xi has consolidated absolute power. They can’t just tell the leader what he wants to hear because there is no single leader. Lastly, it should be pointed out that Mexico was a single party dictatorship for over seventy years (from the early 1920s to the middle 90s) and we were fine with that. The Party of Institutional Revolution (or however you want to translate PRI) was nominally a socialist democracy with all the corruption and fraudulent elections you’d expect, but political power was never permanently concentrated in the hands of one man. Mexico had a dictatorship with term limits. Every six years the PRI would select the next presidente behind closed doors (and he would go on to fraudulently win the presidential election). Without getting too heavily into Mexican political history (and I am far from an expert), the point is that the U.S. was fine with a corrupt socialist “democracy” on our southern border. The two countries cooperated. At times we had disagreements, but the relationship worked. There is no reason that a similar relationship with Vietnam couldn’t work.
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