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Background Brief: Vietnam: Is the U.S. Pivoting on Agent Orange? Carlyle A. Thayer August 15, 2012

[client name deleted] The United States and Vietnam have begun cleaning up Agent Orange in part of Da Nang International Airport, marking it the first time that Washington has been involved in cleaning up Agent Orange in Vietnam. "We are both moving earth and taking the first steps to bury the legacies of our past," U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam David Shear said at a ceremony at Da Nang airport on Thursday. Given the Obama Administrations announcement of its pivot towards Asia, and given the USs stated concern about South China Sea tensions, some analysts read the cleanup in Da Nang as part of a larger campaign to make friends and enhance US power in the region as a buffer against China. Would you say thats a correct reading of the situation? ANSWER: There is no direct linkage between the U.S. "pivot" to Asia and the recent involvement of the U.S. in the cleanup of dioxin left by Agent Orange. U.S. involvement in Agent Orange has been a prolonged historical process. In 1973, when the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring the Peace was signed, two commitments were linked. Vietnam pledged to provide a full accounting for American Prisoners of War/Missing in Action and the United States pledged to contribute to healing the wounds of war. In 1975, when the Paris Peace Agreement failed to stop a renewal of fighting, the U.S. announced that it was no longer bound by the Agreements terms, charging the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with violating the Agreement. Subsequently, the U.S. Congress put legislative restrictions on the State Department to prevent paying reparations as the price of normalizing diplomatic relations. The U.S. Congress viewed "healing the wounds of war" as reparations. Vietnam and the United States managed to normalize relations and in doing so quarantined the POW/MIA issue by declaring it a humanitarian issue. Subsequently Vietnam has continually pressed the United States to take responsibility for the legacy of war - unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange in particular. The question of Agent Orange had huge legal implications for the U.S. government in terms of liability towards Americans, allies and the Vietnamese people who were exposed to it. But over time U.S. attitudes towards Vietnam changed along with changes in international norms about the responsibility of states to clean up the

2 legacies caused by war. In more recent years Vietnam has insisted on a U.S. commitment to clear up Agent Orange hot spots as part of their evolving bilateral relationship. In my opinion, the U.S. has been motivated to address Vietnam's concerns in order to advance the bilateral relationship on the basis of a rough kind of reciprocity. The more the bilateral relationship has developed, the more willing the United States has been to address the Agent Orange issue. In other words, the momentum to address this issue was already there before the U.S. announced its pivot to Asia. In logic you cannot prove a negative. I cannot prove that the United States was not motivated to improve its relations with Vietnam over Agent Orange in order to curry favour with Hanoi. But I think the Agent Orange issue was minimal. The real linkage in U.S. thinking is access for its military in Vietnam in exchange for countering China in the South China Sea.

Suggested citation: Carlyle A. Thayer, Vietnam: Is the U.S. Pivoting on Agent Orange?, Thayer Consultancy Background Brief, August 15, 2012. Thayer Consultancy Background Briefs are archived and may be accessed at: http://www.scribd.com/carlthayer.

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