Did We Just Win the Vietnam War?
Half a century after America’s withdrawal, Vietnam has quietly vindicated U.S. sacrifice—abandoning Marxism for nationalism and embracing the very ideals America once defended.
By Stephen B. Young and Bradley A. Thayer
November 1, 2025
Over 50 years since America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War, history has legitimized and vindicated its sacrifice in the Vietnam War.
While few Americans have noticed, Vietnam’s new General Secretary of the Communist Party, To Lam, has replaced Marxist-Leninism as the Party’s governing ideology with something more authentically Vietnamese: Truong Ton Dan Toc, or “Vietnamese nationalism.”
That is a bombshell. Hanoi has just abandoned its Communist ideology, which governed it since 1954 and sustained it in its wars against the United States and its ally South Vietnam, and with its Communist neighbors, Cambodia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Marxist-Leninism came to the Vietnamese from France. Thus, Communist Vietnam was actually a neocolonial state, its ideology imported from Europe to rule the Vietnamese, first in the North and, after 1975, the entire country. Now freed from the yoke of Communism, the Vietnamese have returned to the nationalism that was theirs all along.
In his speech of April 27, 2025, To Lam presented his party as one dedicated to Vietnamese nationalism, not Marxist-Leninism, saying that honor will always be given to those who sacrificed for the Vietnamese people’s “happiness and prosperity” and “their truong ton and development.” He added that, today, all Vietnamese—no matter where they live—have the same ancestral mother, Au Co, and are equally “children of dragons and grandchildren of angels,” and affirmed that all Vietnamese—no matter where they live—should contribute to the future of “their” people, not to the imposition of an ideology.
To Lam called for a new Vietnam, for a new era in Vietnamese history, one possessing “peace, wealth, civilized education, development, and pure Vietnameseness.”
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https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/01/did-we-just-win-the-vietnam-war/
