They built an entire civilization on the idea that God is on their side. Not a foreign God. Not an old-testament God of wrath and conquest, which would at least be honest. A Jesus God. A turn-the-other-cheek, blessed-are-the-meek, it’s-easier-for-a-camel-to-pass-through-the-eye-of-a-needle-than-for-a-rich-man-to-enter-heaven God. That God. The one who specifically, explicitly, repeatedly told his followers to care for the poor, resist the powerful, refuse violence, love their enemies. They took that God and they put him on aircraft carriers. They put him in the mouths of politicians voting for defense budgets. They gave him to televangelists who told congregations that wealth was "divine favor" and that bombing Muslim countries was "spiritual warfare." They built the most powerful military empire in history and they wrapped it in the theology of a man who died opposing one. And then they looked at the people praying in the ruins of the cities their planes had bombed and said: "Their God is dangerous."

"We left" is a remarkable sentence. You left because the American public had turned against the war, because the casualties had become intolerable, because Congress was increasingly unwilling to keep financing it, and because a guerrilla army in a small Southeast Asian country made the price of continuing the war higher than Washington could politically sustain. That's not leaving. That's the definition of losing. On the refugees: yes. Some Vietnamese came to America and built good lives. That's real and worth respecting. It's also not the argument you think it is. People fleeing the chaos produced substantially by American bombing and political destabilization, finding safety in America, does not retroactively justify the war that created the chaos. On the Khmer Rouge and killing fields: those were Cambodian, not Vietnamese. And the destabilization of Cambodia, the secret bombing campaign, the illegal incursion, was American policy. You don't get to light a region on fire and then cite the burns as evidence the region needed burning. On Vietnam after reunification: the country emerged from decades of colonialism and war devastated, sanctioned, isolated, and facing new security threats almost immediately. Its post-war policies were sometimes harsh, but they did not occur in a vacuum. And Cambodia was not some unprovoked Vietnamese adventure. The Khmer Rouge had carried out repeated massacres across the Vietnamese border and openly claimed Vietnamese territory. Vietnam's intervention destroyed the Khmer Rouge regime, ended its rule of mass killing, and stopped those attacks. Vietnam does not need to apologise for surviving what was done to it. Nor does acknowledging the complexity of its post-war history absolve America of responsibility for the war it waged. On communism failing: Vietnam is still governed by the Communist Party today. And in 2026, Vietnam is not merely Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing economy, but one of the fastest-growing in the world. The American trade embargo, which you forgot to mention, remained in place until 1994, nearly twenty years after reunification, restricting Vietnam's trade, investment, and access to the international lending during some of its hardest years of reconstruction. The system you're defending sanctioned a country it had already waged war against for two decades and then cited its poverty as proof of ideological failure. "We were right all along." Right about what, exactly? The war that killed three million people and ended with helicopters on a rooftop? The domino theory that didn't happen? The democracy you were defending, which was a rotating series of American-approved military dictators who never held a legitimate election? You weren't right all along. You lost, told yourself you left, watched the country you failed to destroy rebuild itself, and are now taking credit for the outcome. Vietnam is still here. Still sovereign. Still itself. Still not asking for your verdict on whether it earned that.