Pierre Asselin
speaker
562 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3d ago
Pierre Asselin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the thing, right? The French War in Algeria is so much in common with the American War in Vietnam. It's sensible because we always compare the American War in Vietnam to the French War in Vietnam. And that's wrong. We should be comparing it to the French War in Algeria.
There are many more parallels and similarities between those two conflicts than there are between the American War in Vietnam and the French War in Vietnam that preceded it.
I think the Americans were always more committed to a diplomatic solution than their counterparts in Hanoi. And when Johnson decides that he's going to try and solve this diplomatically, various efforts are made to connect with Hanoi.
Ultimately, all these initiatives are going to fail primarily because the leaders on the other side, the leaders in Hanoi, have no interest whatsoever in a negotiated solution. They're going to pretend to be interested because it's going to elevate their profile, their standing internationally, right? They're going to look reasonable, right?
But we now know from the record on the communist side that fundamentally this willingness to negotiate was not matched by an actual desire to find a compromise solution to the war. Until the latter stages of the war, leaders in Hanoi are going to remain convinced that they can win this militarily if they're patient enough and if they make the proper investment.
So that would be the public narrative, right? So the communists are a really remarkable propaganda machine. And they were extremely good at controlling the narrative of the war, particularly the narrative that the international community consumed, if you will. And they certainly presented the American intervention as kind of this neo-colonial crusade, right?
But again, amongst themselves, privately, they recognize this as the United States essentially trying to contain their Marxist-Leninist ambitions. In the context of the Cold War, I really think the United States had no choice but to become involved in Vietnam.
And while the outcome and the circumstances that produced were certainly tragic, you know, it's hard to imagine the United States avoiding Vietnam in light of what's happening internationally. But what we see communist leaders do from the moment the Americans intervene is start tracing these parallels between what the Americans are doing and what the French did before them.
And of course, the international community loves this stuff, right? Because Vietnam has already been a victim of... of colonial exploitation and manipulation. So it becomes easy to cast the Americans in that same light. There's a commitment on the part of leaders in Hanoi to this Marxist-Leninist design.
We now know leaders in Hanoi were really shocked by Nixon's victory and they were deeply troubled by it. During the last year of his presidency, Johnson tries really, really hard to make peace happen. He curtails the bombing. He is very, very accommodating. And as it turns out, Hanoi will interpret all of this as weakness on the part of the Americans.
And so instead of encouraging Hanoi to negotiate, Johnson's overture are going to essentially kind of make Hanoi solidify its position, right? So it's all perception, right? But we now know that in Hanoi, Johnson's, I guess, flexibility was interpreted as weakness. Nixon comes to power, and leaders in Hanoi are very much aware of his background, and they are concerned.
Then Nixon decides to Vietnamize the war, which is really de-Americanize the Vietnamese civil war. And they like that. But then he starts talking to the Chinese. He starts talking to the Soviets. He invades Cambodia. He invades Laos. And then the communist leadership is really, really concerned about Nixon.
And that's going to make them a little more humble in the way that they approach diplomacy with the Americans.
No. So, you know, people always talk about the Tet Offensive as America's biggest intelligence failure in Vietnam. How could we not see this coming? To me, the biggest intelligence failure of the whole war is the inability of American leaders to ever understand who they were up against. You know, all along, they assume Ho Chi Minh is in charge, right?
And then Ho Chi Minh dies in 69, and they're still not clear on who's running the show in Hanoi. We now know that long before American ground troops are committed to South Vietnam, we have a leadership of really, really hard men in power, that has effectively sidelined Ho Chi Minh and the famous General Giap. A guy by the name of Le Duan or Le Zuan is basically calling the shots in Hanoi.
And those guys are uncompromising. And Americans never knew until long after the war was over who exactly were those guys and the extent that they never understood also the extent of their commitment to what communists called total victory.
Before entering into negotiations, what Nixon essentially tried to do was enhance his bargaining position, which I know I respected because the communists in Vietnam, especially after the whole Geneva fiasco of 1954, always told themselves that moving forward, they would only negotiate from what they call a position of strength.
You enhance your position on the field of battle, and then you negotiate. And that's exactly what Nixon ends up doing. He's following his own plan, but Nixon understands that it's really pointless to engage with Hanoi unless I have leverage over them. And that's why, you know, Nixon is going to open a secret channel to Hanoi, a so-called back channel, in the summer of 1969.
But, you know, he's kind of like the Vietnamese, right? He's using this to probe the other guys. But then in the meantime, what he does is he undertakes a series of initiatives that are meant to increase the pressure on Hanoi to negotiate on the one hand and then enhance the American bargaining position on the other. And that's very, very clever foreign policymaking, if you ask me.
The idea is you subsume the so-called military struggle under your diplomatic struggle, right? So all along you want to negotiate, but you understand that you can be better positioned to negotiate if your battlefield situation is favorable. And so as part of that strategy, we see Nixon sponsoring this invasion of Cambodia and a year later that of Laos, right? And that's meant to kind of
Showing 481–500 of 562 · page 25 of 29
← Previous
Next →