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Hanoi will move slowly toward market reforms despite a new U.S. trade pact.
President Clinton didn't visit Hanoi last November to hobnob with communists. He traveled to Vietnam hoping to exorcise the demons from the relationship between the most powerful country on earth and the Third World nation that dealt them a humiliating military defeat. Relations between Washington and Hanoi have been haunted by that war for twenty-five years, a period much longer than the time it took the United States to establish amity with Germany and Japan, against whom wars were fought at the expense of far more American lives. By visiting Vietnam, Clinton hoped to raise the diplomatic bar so that subsequent visits by American business executives and politicians will no longer be groundbreaking, but routine. For Vietnam, a visit from the sitting President of the United States was more than just a symbolic gesture; it was an attempt to make a historic agreement genuine.
There were, however, deeply symbolic gestures to be made in Vietnam. Clinton visited the site where the Joint Task Force Full Accounting (JTFA), the Pentagon team responsible for recovering the remains of missing Americans, was investigating a possible American plane crash. Recovering Americans still missing from the war is a process that the United States must complete for its own sense of closure. Another objective was to bring to bear the symbolic power of the President of the United States as the fountainhead of freedom and democracy. Using Ronald Reagan's trip to the Soviet Union in 1988 as a model, Clinton gave a speech live on Vietnamese television. Unfiltered by state propaganda, Clinton imparted his message of freedom and hope for the future directly to the people of Vietnam. Although his remarks may appear insignificant, Ronald Reagan delivered a similar speech in May 1988, and a year later the Soviet Union was no more. Though words alone were not enough to conquer communism, it served to inspire the forces that led to the demise of the Iron Curtain. Clinton's success in bringing his message was evident from the thousands of people who crowded the streets with the fervor reserved for pop icons just to catch a glimpse of the American President.
The most important objective, however, was...