50 Years After the War, Trump Undermines U.S.-Vietnam Reconciliation

Time​ Magazine

30-04-2025

A called different things: Liberation Day, Reunification Day, Unity Day, Victory Day. But five decades after the collapse of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government, it's less the name of the commemoration and more America's legacy in Vietnam and future relationship with the Southeast Asian country that is mired in uncertainty.
Over 20 years of fighting, the Vietnam War—or American War, as it's known in Vietnam—cost the lives of almost 60,000 American servicemembers and more than 3 million Vietnamese and left a lasting mark on both nations. In the 50 years since, particularly the past 30 after formal relations were normalized in 1995, Washington has pursued reconciliation efforts with Hanoi, including a number of programs that sought to repair some of the damage the war wrought on generations of Vietnamese.
In 2023 the two governments upgraded ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the highest-level cooperative agreement under Vietnamese standards.
'We've come a long way, and it's profoundly changed the nature of our relations from former enemies to now partners,' says Tim Rieser, who served for 37 years as a foreign policy aide of then-Senator Patrick Leahy (D, Vt.), who was known for leading humanitarian efforts between the U.S. and Vietnam, and now serves as a senior policy advisor to Sen. Peter Welch (D, Vt.).
But under President Donald Trump's second-term administration, which marks its 100th day also on April 30, 2025, that progress is now at risk, Rieser and others tell TIME.
In recent months, the Trump Administration announced a freeze on a majority of foreign aid contracts via USAID, which in Vietnam helped to fund a number of reconciliation projects, including cleanup and rehabilitation programs addressing the effects of toxic herbicides used in the war, such as Agent Orange. The State Department also temporarily suspended global mine-clearing programs, including groups in Vietnam that have worked to clear unexploded ordnance (UXO) left behind from the war.
The Trump Administration has since backtracked on some of these moves. Some USAID programs related to Vietnam have been 'unterminated,' after a group of senators, including Welch, penned a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Meanwhile, the State Department order on demining was meant to last three months, and a State Department spokesperson tells TIME that 'U.S. demining programs in Vietnam are active with clearance operations ongoing.' Still, the Washington Post reported Wednesday that at least 34 of 43 USAID contracts with Vietnam have been axed and about 100 USAID employees let go.
The State Department spokesperson explained to TIME: 'Programs that have been terminated were determined to not fit within the standards laid out by Secretary Rubio for U.S. foreign assistance, which must make the United States stronger, safer, or more prosperous. The United States remains committed to strengthening its partnership with Vietnam. Ensuring we have the right mix of programs to support U.S. national security and other core national interests of the United States requires an agile approach. We will continue to make changes as needed. The United States and Vietnam have a robust bilateral relationship and we are committed to deepening and broadening those ties. We look forward to working with the Vietnamese government and people to address shared challenges and opportunities.'
But some damage has already been done.
'This Administration has done severe damage to the credibility of this country in the perceptions of people around the world that we're no longer a reliable partner,' says Rieser. 'It's the consequence of actions by people in Washington who have little sense of history, who know nothing of the importance of what we've done to build this relationship over many years.'
A 2006 study led by Charles Bailey, who worked in Vietnam from 1997 to 2007 as a representative of the Ford Foundation, found that there were three hot spots of dioxin—a toxic contaminant in Agent Orange, an herbicide used by U.S. forces during the war that has caused a range of disabilities among millions of Vietnamese: Phu Cat, which was cleaned up without U.S. aid; Da Nang, which was cleaned up through a USAID-funded project that was completed in 2018; and Bien Hoa, which was the worst contaminated.
The U.S. launched a campaign to decontaminate Bien Hoa during Trump's first term in 2019. The project would take 10 years and cost a total $450 million, funded by USAID and the Department of Defense.
But amid USAID cuts, workers on the project at Bien Hoa Air Base on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, were suddenly told in February to stop working. According to ProPublica, pits of contaminated soil were left exposed or covered with flimsy tarps before the U.S. appeared to reverse course a week later, but Bailey tells TIME it's not certain for how long funding will continue or how the project will fare once most USAID staffers leave Vietnam later this year.
In addition to clean-up programs, USAID provided $30 million of annual funding to Agent Orange-related disability rehabilitation programs in 10 provinces in Vietnam, some of which have resumed. But Bailey says several organizations lacked the financial resources to 'bridge the gap between the original termination and the resumption,' so even when funds slowly began to flow in again, they had to let some staff go. 'The practical matter is that they are not fully functioning,' says Bailey.
Demining programs were also paused as part of the U.S. freeze on foreign aid. The halt at least temporarily cost some 1,000 people their jobs in Quang Tri, according to the province's foreign affairs department. The province is believed to have the highest number of unexploded mines in Vietnam. Vietnamese media have estimated that UXO are responsible for some 40,000 deaths and 60,000 injuries since the end of the war in 1975.
The State Department told TIME that 'war legacy projects including dioxin remediation programs in Bien Hoa and demining programs in Quang Tri remain active and running.'
Another program started during Trump's first term and paused during his second is the Vietnam Wartime Accounting Initiative, a $15 million effort to help Vietnam locate and identify the remains of hundreds of thousands of people missing from the war that USAID and the Department of Defense began funding in 2020. Thao Griffiths, a commissioner of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) tells TIME that the Trump Administration terminated the program and put it under review, before reinstating it around a month later. It took around another month to hire and train new staff to get the program running again.
Rieser says addressing the war's legacy in Vietnam has long been important to the U.S. because lingering problems like Agent Orange, UXO, and unaccounted-for persons were 'a source of continuing anger and resentment' for the Vietnamese. 'There's hardly a family in Vietnam that didn't lose somebody or that doesn't know someone who died during the war and has never been accounted for,' he says. 'We couldn't get to ways of cooperating in other areas, whether it's maritime security, law enforcement, higher education, climate change, or public health, unless we first dealt with this.'
At the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, photographs of the 1968 My Lai massacre in which American soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians line the walls. There's an exhibit of the Con Dao prison, which was built by French colonists in 1861 but used by the Americans during the war to hold prisoners, who were routinely abused and kept shackled in cramped 'tiger cages.' Another exhibit shows photographs of the devastating effects of U.S. napalm bombs and Agent Orange.
It's 'essentially a museum of American war crimes,' Rieser says. But 'there's another chapter to the story, and that is what we've done since the war to deal with the terrible things that happened.'
'The dominant cultural memory in Vietnam has centered around heroic national resistance and sacrifices to defend the nation against foreign invaders,' including the U.S., says Phan Xuan Dung, a Vietnam Studies researcher at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute and a PhD candidate at the Australian National University, but cooperation in addressing legacies of the war 'helped to build trust' between the two sides.
A new exhibit meant to open in July, which was spearheaded by former Sen. Leahy and Rieser and backed by $2 million in USAID funding, was supposed to highlight American reconciliation efforts and positive U.S.-Vietnam cooperation. According to Rieser, it would have shown that 'the United States didn't just walk away from the past and that we've tried to address it as best we can.' But the exhibit, like other war legacy programs, has also fallen victim to the Trump Administration's ruthless slashing. 'We've been working very hard to meet that deadline, and then suddenly, some anonymous uninformed person in Washington stops the funding with no idea what this is, or why it's important, or the consequences,' says Rieser.
What's at stake is U.S. credibility, says Phan. The Trump Administration's recent actions, which also include the high tariffs on global trading partners that the White House announced earlier in April then temporarily paused, 'reinforce Vietnam's belief that the U.S. is not a reliable partner, and thus Vietnam needs to avoid being reliant on the U.S., even on assistance to deal with the aftermath of U.S. wartime actions.'
Rieser says that it is particularly critical to maintain strong ties with Vietnam in order to counter the influence of China in Southeast Asia and protect U.S. interests in the region. Chinese troops marched through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City at this year's military parade for the first time, following Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Vietnam earlier this month. The invitation to China to participate in the Vietnamese parade—alongside representatives from neighbors Laos and Cambodia—was framed as a move to celebrate the 'long-standing traditional friendship and bonds' between the countries and their support for Vietnam in its struggle for independence, even as China and Vietnam clashed over their border from 1979, didn't officially normalize relations until 1991, and continue to dispute territory in the South China Sea.
'For us to be taking steps that cause uncertainty in our relations with Vietnam, whether it's by suddenly imposing large tariffs or walking away from war legacy programs that are important to both countries, to downgrading our engagement with Vietnam,' says Rieser, 'it's the polar opposite of what a sensible U.S. foreign policy should look like in that part of the world.'
Just days before the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration told its senior diplomats in Vietnam—including U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Marc Knapper—not to participate in April 30 commemoration events, citing four unnamed sources. Vietnamese officials, however, said they still expected U.S. officials to attend, and the Times later reported that the U.S. Consul General Susan Burns ended up doing so.
Historically, U.S. diplomats have not attended annual Vietnamese Victory day parades, instead holding separate ceremonies on April 30 and coming together later in the year to commemorate the anniversary of normalized ties.
But a number of Americans had been planning to attend commemorative events for the 50th anniversary of the end of the war—and a number still did, including John Terzano, a veteran of the Vietnam War and cofounder of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize-winning Campaign for a Landmine Free World, who is frustrated by the Trump Administration's 'fickle' approach to diplomacy.
'Vietnam is a country and a people that deeply believes in symbolism. What makes the current [U.S.] ambassador and his presence or non-presence here so symbolic is he's the son of a Vietnam veteran,' Terzano tells TIME. 'He represents, in my opinion, the passing of the torch from one generation to another.'
The Trump Administration's recent actions, on the other hand, show a lack of understanding of the historical significance of the U.S. and Vietnam's relationship, Terzano says. 'April 30 is a day of peace. It is a day of commemoration and acknowledging sacrifices of people made on both sides, but it's also a day of looking forward,' he says. 'The United States is really still stuck in the past.'