How Communist Diplomat Lê Đức Thọ outsmarted and defeated Kissinger and the US empire

On the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the genius of Communist Vietnamese diplomacy

North Vietnam’s Lê Đức Thọ and United State’s Henry Kissinger meet in secret talks at Saint-Nom-La-Breteche near Paris on January 13, 1973

I’m writing this to clarify a point of historical fact that can’t be condensed into a single tweet. Yesterday I posted a thread on Vietnamese revolutionary Võ Thị Thắng. In the replies a NAFO Azov Nazi freak appeared to make an analogy between Vietnam and Ukraine, saying the following:

I wonder why the Vietcong did not negotiate a compromise with the US, giving up large parts of their land. I mean, everybody knows it is impossible to win a war against a nuclear power, right? Also, why did China and SU escalate the conflict by sending so many weapons?

To which I replied:

You have no clue what you're talking about. North Vietnam was seeking negotiations with the US from the beginning and was willing to compromise and leave South Vietnam out of the peace deal, which is what actually happened. They conceded the entire Southern half of the country.

After the peace deal was signed with this huge concession, the US withdrew most of its troops from the South but kept sending them massive amounts of funding and arms and training them. The North then invaded and liberated the South despite US objections and threats.

Now this is just totally uncontroversial historical fact. But I logged on today seeing a thread by someone whose work I generally appreciate very much (and I highly recommend subscribing to her YouTube channel), saying that this statement of historical fact in response to a deranged NAFO troll is not only factually wrong, but also some kind of huge betrayal of anti-imperialist values. Why? Because I clearly do not understand what happened with the 1954 Geneva Accords, where the French and its imperialist allies refused to hold a democratic national election because they knew Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would prevail as they had mass support.

By denying this truth and falsifying it, I clearly have committed a great sin against the revolutionary anti-imperialist resistance struggle of Vietnam.

There’s only one problem: I clearly wasn’t referring to the 1954 Geneva Accords, I was referring to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords (or Paris Agreement as it is also known).

Just look at the thread Luna Oi wrote, where she only talks about the 1954 Geneva Accords. But that makes no sense. Clearly the US did not withdraw all its forces post 1954 as I said in my response to that NAFO freak, so how could she possibly have misinterpreted what I was referring to?

Now I’m going to show some restraint here and extend the principle of charity to her and say it was only a simple misunderstanding, although because of her thread some of her followers are in my mentions right now calling me a fake leftist pro-imperialist liar and propagandist, because they’re incapable of doing basic thinking before they accept whatever their fav content creator says.

Again I’m pushing it by extending this charity to Luna because someone else actually pointed out that I was referring to the Paris Peace Accords, to which she replied saying that that doesn’t change anything she said, and that I’m still a liar propagandist. But again, I have no issues with her work, I generally appreciate it, and I would prefer to see this as a misunderstanding that can be easily clarified and moved on from.

So now let’s go the actual historical record. First of all, framing what I wrote in response to that NAFO freak as some horrible undermining of the great revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle of Vietnam is simply bizarre (and I am not saying Luna did this, but some of her followers are in my mentions). Why would it be a betrayal of the anti-imperialist struggle for the North Vietnamese government to formally accept the South Vietnamese fascist puppet regime in the Paris Accords (along with other concessions I will detail shortly) because they wanted the withdrawal of US forces, more importantly, the commitment from the US that they would not get back in and directly involved on the side of its puppet regime, as by that point many US troops had already withdrawn, though they kept a significant air force presence, one of the concessions from the North I referred to.

No, that’s not a defeat or betrayal or whatever, it’s a brilliant diplomatic strategy to bring to an end the US bombing campaign of the North that it had been using throughout the negotiation period and doing significant damage with to the North’s economy and infrastructure, while also getting them mostly out of the picture from the South (or at least incurring so much costs on them for getting back in that it would be very difficult for them to do so), so they could liberate it in the short-term, which is exactly what they did merely two years later in 1975.

That’s not a defeat, that’s a victory. Their temporary concessions in the Paris Peace Accords, which the US tried to sell as a huge victory for them because they got the North to concede from their initial position of the South Vietnamese puppet regime being fundamentally illegitimate and having to be deconstructed as part of any kind of peace deal, was in fact nothing but a Pyrrhic victory for the US. Nixon and the security state was hoping for another Korea, whereby the concessions given by the North could be solidified and the South could survive just long enough with US material support that it could maintain a rump fascist police state in the mid to longer term.

But they were wrong. The North Vietnamese and their chief negotiator Lê Đức Thọ were right. They made the concession, because they knew that the South had no popular legitimacy and support, and in the short term they could easily be overthrown because of this. By the way, when the North did invade in contravention of the Paris Accords, the US threatened to intervene to help the South. But as I said before, the costs by that point were too great for them to get back in. Congress blocked it, Nixon was already out of the political scene, and his successor Ford had no political capital to withstand Congressional and broader public pressure. It was over. The Vietnamese negotiators at the Paris Peace Accords behaved and acted brilliantly.

This is something to commend them for, to celebrate them for, they successfully defeated the empire, they outsmarted them by giving these concessions that symbolically seemed huge and were sold as such by the US, but in fact where totally meaningless because of the reality on the ground, which the revolutionaries in Vietnam knew perfectly well, namely again that the South Vietnamese puppet regime had no legitimacy and popular backing.

Why on earth would you dispute the factual historical record and say that anyone who states it is actually being some anti-revolutionary pro-imperialist propagandist and liar? It’s such a bizarre and unnecessary move to make because you misunderstood what I was referring to in my replies to some NAFO freak, thinking it was about Geneva 1954 instead of the Paris Accords of 1973, and then when finding out about it trying to say actually it applies to both.

Again, I have extended the principle of charity to Luna because I appreciate her work, and I have no clarified this point of basic historical record which is undeniable, and I hope this resolves it.

To provide sources to everything I said from the standard historical scholarship on the subject (again, it’s just totally uncontroversial, you can go and read it in the Paris Agreement for yourself), here are excerpts from Asselin’s A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement. Note the concessions made by the North Vietnamese (DRVN) in relation to the South Vietnamese fascist puppet regime (RVN) propped up by US arms, funding and training, exactly as I said in my response to that NAFO freak: