Following the end of the Vietnam War and the takeover by North Vietnam of South Vietnam, unifying the country, the United States refused to establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Only in the 1990s, under the William J. Clinton administration, did the United States establish diplomatic relations with the unified nation of Vietnam.
On April 30, 1975, a helicopter lifted the last Americans off the embassy roof in Saigon, marking the final end of the Vietnam War, as victorious North Vietnamese troops marched into the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Relations between the United States and Vietnam remained strained until the late 1980s, as tensions between the two countries gradually eased with the end of the COLD WAR. When the Vietnamese-Soviet relationship ended, so did the $1.6 billion in annual aid from the USSR to Vietnam. Around the same time, the United States ceased to recognize the government of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which had opposed the Vietnamese-supported government of Premier Hun Sen in Phnom Penh. Only in 1989 did the Vietnamese withdraw most of their forces from Cambodia under the new Khmer Rouge government. Two years later, in 1991, a UN-brokered settlement ended the Cambodian civil war. In 1991 President George H. W. Bush authorized travel, and commercial sales of food and medicine, to Vietnam. Further progress in establishing relations with Vietnam came under the Clinton administration, starting in 1993. In his first year in office, President Bill Clinton authorized international lending to Vietnam and allowed American firms to agree to development projects. In 1994 President Clinton, with support from the U. S. Senate, lifted the trade embargo with Vietnam.
On July 11, 1995, President Clinton announced the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and still-communist Vietnam. He named former
Vietnam prisoner of war Douglas B. Peterson as America’s first ambassador. The establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries allowed for continued efforts to find and return the remains of 1,900 American servicemen still unaccounted for as of January 31, 2001.
The normalization of economic relations with Vietnam received a boost when in 2000 President George W. Bush signed the U. S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, which in effect gave Vietnam normal trade relations status.
—Leah Blakey
World History
