THE U.S. attempt to starve Vietnam out, through a political and economic embargo, is senseless. Most Americans are not even aware that such a campaign is under way. After all, within the past year the U.S. government has re-approved most-favored-nation trade status for China, prepared to donate food to the Soviet Union, found a way to coexist with the brutal new SLORC regime in Burma, and applied a forgive-and-forget economic policy to most nations other than Iraq. But in Vietnam the U.S. embargo remains the central fact of economic life. It makes existence undeservedly miserable for many millions of people, while doing no visible good for anyone -- except, perhaps, for businessmen in Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and Japan.
The second part of the embargo policy consists of U.S. pressure on the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to keep them, too, from dealing normally with Vietnam. Although the United States is the single biggest force in each of these organizations, on its own it cannot dictate their policies. But the Japanese representatives, who make up the second-largest voting bloc, have lined up behind the United States on this issue, and together the two countries have stonily kept most international organizations out of Vietnam. The United Nations operates a few small development-aid programs and an extensive refugee-processing system within Vietnam, but in general Vietnam must exist outside the network of loans, international credits, financial restructuring plans, and so forth that countries from Ghana to Peru to Bangladesh can participate in. (Technically, the IMF excludes Vietnam not because of the embargo but because Vietnam hasn't paid off some $140 million in old debts. Vietnam is hardly the only Third World country in arrears. Its problem could be cleared up with bridge loans, as has been done in many other countries, if Japanese and American banks could get involved.) Apart from the Soviet Union -- which has for the past decade subsidized Vietnam's economy, received tens of thousands of Vietnamese guest workers, and provided cut-rate shipments of fertilizer and oil -- Sweden and Finland are the only nations that have given Vietnam substantial amounts of foreign aid.
Of the two components of the embargo, the pressure on international organizations is the more important. Vietnam has what is politely referred to as an "infrastructure problem." The roads, the telephones, the electrical-power network, and the water and sewage systems are terrible or nonexistent. I asked Vo Dai Luoc, of the Institute for World Economy, in Hanoi, "which problem is most urgent? Transportation? Communications? Power?" He answered, "yes" -- and not because he misunderstood me. The amount of money needed to create a telephone system for 6 million people, rebuild roads not maintained for twenty years, and renovate antique seaports and airports is more than any private investor will put up. Since the end of the Second World War mammoth infrastructure projects in many parts of the world have typically been sponsored by the World Bank or other international lending organizations; this is how Japan built its Bullet Train system in the 1960s. Other countries throughout Asia draw constantly on World Bank and Asian Development Bank advice and loans. Vietnam cannot, because the United States says no. Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam are inching toward cooperation on several Mekong River projects, to cope with the environmental ruin of the Southeast Asian forests. The Mekong committee's office in Hanoi has a thick folder of requests for funding: so much to monitor water quality, so much to restock fish, so much to offset the intrusion of salt water into the Mekong Delta region. None of this can go anywhere so long as Vietnam is classified as a pariah.
