As many as three million Vietnamese have been affected by Agent Orange, including more than 150,000 children born with serious developmental problems.
Addressing the painful legacy of the chemical’s wartime use as a defoliant, along with other issues tied to American military involvement in Vietnam, has offered the U.S. a chance to fuse past and present, soft power and hard power, in the service of courting a rising regional power.
That’s now halted. Bulldozers that were cleaning up contamination at a former American air base in southern Vietnam — which both countries might eventually want to use — have gone silent. Around 1,000 mine-removal workers in central Vietnam have been sent home.
And with the suspension of aid for Agent Orange victims, along with efforts to find and identify Vietnam’s missing war dead, Mr. Trump has essentially stalled 30 years of progress in bringing together former enemies, including two militaries still feeling out whether to trust one another.
While Vietnam’s leaders have tread carefully with the Trump administration, hoping to avoid its punitive tariffs, they have lamented the loss of war legacy programs. They have long viewed the work as a prerequisite for almost everything else.
American officials who spent a lifetime building bilateral bonds are especially furious, signing open letters of complaint and condemning what they see as a plainly misguided move.