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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 1. 28th February 1973

What will Happen Now?

What will Happen Now?

The North Vietnamese and P.R.G. leaders are not so politically and militarily stupid as to provoke full scale war in Vietnam in the immediate future and thus give the Americans an excuse to return. The caution of the D.R.V. and P.R.G. leaders in this respect can be seen in one comment in particular that Vu Dinh, the Mayor of Hanoi, made last week at a Press Conference on the arrival of the D.R.V. trade union delegation from Australia. When he was questioned about violations of the ceasefire he said that these violations did not amount to a resumption of full-scale fighting. He stressed that the P.R.G. armed forces would only fight if attacked and would not initiate fighting themselves.

Only if Thieu's regime is clearly seen to be in danger of total extinction in the next 12 months is it at all likely that the Americans would try to return to Vietnam in force. But Nixon would not have been prepared to make the concessions he did in order to get rid of the war if Thieu had meant anything more to him than a potential embarrassment. Nixon and Kissinger's foreign policy of trying to create room for manoeuvre by maintaining contact with Moscow and Peking is far more important than the fate of one very expensive lackey in Vietnam. The continuation of American involvement in Vietnam jeopardised this policy, as well as exacerbating the strains on the U.S. economy and society.

The major lesson of the Vietnam war for the American Government is that it cannot afford to get bogged down in wars of national liberation. The effects of the war in Vietnam have been disastrous enough for American Imperialism and Monopoly Capitalism.

The North Vietnamese and the P.R.G. can afford to bide their time for a while because they have successfully negotiated the removal of their major enemy from the battlefield. Thieu, on the other hand, is rapidly running out of time. If he abides by the terms of the Agreement it is pretty certain that his regime will be rapidly replaced by a genuinely popular government as a result of the proposed General Elections. If he decides to fight it out he has to provoke a big enough confrontation to get the Americans back to save him once again. But as Vu Dinh indicated, the P.R.G. are unlikely to be easily provoked into an all out battle. Whatever he does, Thieu's political future looks fairly short.