My Take | Why the US kept making enemies who wanted to be friends: Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Putin
- Through myopia, paranoia and arrogance, America has consistently created its own enemies and harmed other peoples in the interest of empire. Yet again, China is becoming an enemy, a role it doesn’t want but can’t refuse
The list of US enemies, past and present, is long. According to American mythologies, most of them were evil incarnate. But only a global empire could have made such diverse enemies around the world. I have just chosen three for convenience and relevance.
Their initial friendly approaches to the United States could have helped avert the subsequent conflicts and slaughters, if reciprocated. But they were either rejected or ignored.
Ho Chi Minh
From the Versailles peace conference in 1919 to Ho’s declaration of independence from France in 1945, he made not one, not two but three open attempts to make friends with the United States, or at least presented himself as an admirer of the American republic and its governing principles. All of them failed.
Ho took Woodrow Wilson’s famous doctrine of self-determination seriously. When the US president arrived at Versailles, as recounted in Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, Ho wrote him an appeal declaring: “[All] subject peoples are filled with hope by the prospect that an era of right and justice is opening to them … in the struggle of civilisation against barbarism.”
In place of French imperialist rule, he proposed a constitutional government with full democratic freedoms while sidestepping the question of independence for Vietnam. But, as Karnow wryly observed, though clothed in universal terms, “[Wilson’s] principles presumably applied only to Europe”, not non-white peoples.
