Trump’s Vietnam

Plus, judge deals setback to Kestenbaum case against Harvard

General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, To Lam, with a statue of Ho Chi Minh.

President Trump posted to social media on April 4, “Just had a very productive call with To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S. I thanked him on behalf of our Country, and said I look forward to a meeting in the near future.”

I have not been a fan of Trump’s tariffs, but that the president’s move has left the Vietnamese Communists begging America for terms, precisely 50 years to the month after the April 1975 evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon, may yet offer a pathway to advance freedom and achieve a long-delayed American win.

Here is how:

Any trade agreement between the U.S. and Vietnam would be incomplete if it deals only with tariffs and not with the freedom of workers in Vietnam to form unions that are not controlled by the government.

Such unions are now effectively banned in Vietnam. If legalized, they could be a lever—both to increase wages and improve working conditions for workers there so they do less to undercut American workers, and also, more significantly, to help defeat communism in Vietnam, the same way that the Solidarity labor movement defeated communism in Poland in the 1980s.