Amazingly, virtually noone in mainstream media commented on the assbackwardness (OK, OK, "irony") of Vietnam's recent agreement to pay the U.S. for loans the U.S. made to the South Vietnamese government. Perhaps U.S. readers simply don't like to be reminded that the Pentagon, with unlimited billions, got its butt kicked in the jungle. The "irony," of course, is that the pact was effectively a payment by Vietnam to reimburse the U.S. for part of its expense in invading the country, scarring the land for generations, and killing millions of people. Since usual post-war protocol is that the loser pays reparations to the winner, the irony is, indeed, thick.

That irony is a result of the mistaken belief that Vietnam won the war. It's time to reassess that. True, the U.S. didn't accomplish its preferred M.O. of annihilating a smaller country and replacing its government at the same time. But the prolonged war in Southeast Asia did accomplish many U.S. foreign policy objectives of the day, bloating the Pentagon budget and modelling for other Third World countries what might happen if they didn't toe the Western line.

Now, 20 years later, Nike and friends are negotiating for that coveted cheap Vietnamese sweatshop labor force. Is that what the VC spent a generation in the jungles fighting for? The international economic embargo the U.S. has pursued against Vietnam wasn't simply the vendetta of a sore loser, or an expression of outrage that the remains of a few (by Vietnamese standards) dead U.S. soldiers were never located. It was a continuation of the war with different weaponry; and, as everywhere else on the planet, the U.S. has finally "won." (The U.S. public has lost, badly, but that's a different issue.)

Or has it won? The global economy enforced by the U.S. is rapidly making nation-states themselves obsolete. Much as U.S. triumphalists might gloat over this latest humiliation to a Vietnam still left broke, scarred, and defoliated by our pro-democracy efforts, the national economy here is every bit as much a pawn in this game. Wars like the subjugation of Vietnam are now fought not just with new weapons (economic pressure), but for new spoils; the point now isn't territory so much as specific economic resources (oil, water, pliant labor force) and market segments that transcend nation-state boundaries. Guns and tyrants still kill a lot of people around the globe, but Chief Financial Officers are now killing far more.