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The sanctions playbook was rehearsed on Vietnam. After the war, the U.S. blocked Vietnam from the IMF, the World Bank, and virtually every major international financial institution. It maintained a trade embargo that isolated the Vietnamese economy for two decades. It pressured other countries to cut ties. It tried to build an economic wall around a country that had just survived a military one. The logic was the same logic it always is: If we can't destroy you with bombs, we'll destroy you with poverty. Make the economy scream. Make ordinary people suffer until they associate their suffering with their government's independence rather than with the foreign power squeezing them. Wait for collapse. Wait for desperation. Wait for the next coup, the next "color revolution," the next government that will finally do what Washington wants. They waited for twenty years. Vietnam didn't collapse. It didn't beg. It reformed on its own terms, through its own process, at its own pace. It eventually normalized relations, not because it surrendered, but because it was strong enough that America eventually decided engagement served its interests better than isolation. Vietnam outlasted the embargo. The same country that outlasted B-52s outlasted economic strangulation. Every nation currently living under American sanctions should study the Vietnamese experience. Not as a perfect model, nothing is, but as proof that the embargo is not a death sentence. It is a test of endurance. And some peoples are very, very good at endurance.
General William Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, said that Asians do not value human life the way Westerners do. He said this to explain why Vietnamese soldiers kept fighting despite losses that would have broken Western armies. He did not say: perhaps they are fighting for something worth dying for. He did not say: perhaps our intelligence about their will to fight was wrong. He did not say: perhaps we have fundamentally misunderstood this enemy. He said: they don't value life. This is what happens when an army built on the premise of its own civilizational superiority meets a people who simply refuse to accept that premise. The army cannot update its model. It cannot say "we were wrong about who these people are." So it invents a theory where the enemy's resistance is not a sign of strength but a sign of deficiency. They keep fighting because life is cheap to them. Not because their cause is just. Not because they are brave. Because they are less than us. Westmoreland ran the war for years on this theory. He lost. The Vietnamese people, who apparently did not value life, built a country that is alive and growing and free. Westmoreland died in 2005. The people he could not understand are still here. So is the theory.
