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Vietnam's visa requirements can be confusing—plan well ahead of time. Haggling is essential in Vietnam's markets. Check bank notes carefully as many look similar. Drink bottled water (and avoid tap water) to stay hydrated in the heat. Always wear a helmet if riding a scooter. Look for deals on flights to Vietnam today. Also, the U.S. Army had nothing to do with what happened to the infamous " Napalm Girl .". Vietnam war facts are also ones of remarkable feats of courage, determination, and sacrifice. One American crawled for three days to take a single shot that would change the course of the war. A prisoner of war blinked in Morse code to send one Conditions for Making Vietnam Visa Exemption. To enter Vietnam with a Vietnam visa exemption, the eligible travelers are required to ensure: their passport valid for at least 6 months following their date of arrival in Vietnam; and. their passport has at least 02 blank pages. By the time President Gerald R. Ford took office in 1974, the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War had been radically reduced. In 1975, however, renewed fighting saw communist-supported North Vietnamese forces pushing closer to Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, which was still a U.S. ally. Saigon, later called Ho Chi Minh City, would soon fall to the North and the process of Temporary Retirement Visitor Visa. If you are 66 years or older and want to invest in New Zealand, you can apply to stay for up to 2 years. To apply, you will need an annual income of NZ $60,000 plus NZ $750,000 to invest for 2 years, and another NZ $500,000 to live on. materi pai kelas 4 semester 1 kurikulum 2013. Trans-Pacific View Diplomacy Southeast Asia Hanoi enjoys considerable leverage as a frontline state in Washington’s strategic competition with Beijing. Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink, center, Adm. John C. Aquilino, commander of Pacific Fleet, right, Rear Adm. Stu Baker, commander of Carrier Strike Group 9, center-left, and Capt. Brett Crozier, commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN 71, pose for a photo with welcoming officials in Da Nang after Theodore Roosevelt and the guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill CG 52 arrived for a port visit commemorating the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations. Credit Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nicholas V. HuynhShortly after assuming his post as the new ambassador to Vietnam, Marc Knapper gave an extended interview with the local media. In the interview, Knapper affirmed the priority to elevate relations from a comprehensive partnership to a “strategic partnership” during his tenure. Just six months earlier, in August 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris also proposed to upgrade the bilateral relationship to a strategic partnership when she visited Hanoi. The Donald Trump administration, despite its anti-alliance rhetoric, also committed to elevating ties with Vietnam. Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis once referred to the United States and Vietnam as “like-minded partners,” regardless of the differences in political systems. Former ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink said Washington considered Hanoi to be “one of the most important partners in the world.”However, Vietnam’s responses to the proposal have been lackluster. While welcoming the outreach, it did not agree to improve the relationship to a strategic partnership. Harris failed to persuade Hanoi to change its mind during her visit. The newly appointed Vietnam ambassador to the Nguyen Quoc Dung also left out “strategic partnership” as a goal of his tenure. Some Vietnamese officials have described the partnership as strategic in all but name, but officially, the is not one of Vietnam’s 17 strategic partners, putting it behind Australia, Japan, and India, the three other countries in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Quad.Certainly, one of the reasons behind Vietnam’s refusal is the pressure from China. However, such an explanation needs to take the unique dynamics of relations into consideration. The fact that it is the not Vietnam, that keeps pushing for an upgrade is puzzling in two aspects. First, Vietnam, as a weaker state adjacent to China, needs the for its security more than the needs Vietnam. If Vietnam does not want to confront China alone and desires more presence in the South China Sea, it should not have waited for Harris’ offer of a strategic partnership. Washington could have waited for Vietnam to reach out first instead of making the first move, as it has been the has been the party that has conceded to Vietnam on major issues in order to improve the overall bilateral relationship, including breaking its diplomatic protocol to host Vietnamese Communist Party VCP General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in the White House in 2015 and staying silent as Vietnam continued to purchase Russian arms in technical violation of the Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act CAATSA. It is worth noting that the sanctioned its treaty ally Turkey for buying Russia’s S-400 missile system. In short, Vietnam seems to hold the trump card in the bilateral relationship despite the huge power imbalance vis-à-vis the United States. This defies the conventional expectation that the relatively stronger partner has more bargaining leverage over the weaker answer to this puzzle lies in the nature of Vietnam being an “ally of convenience.” The essence of any improvements in relations is to check the rise of China, which allows the two ideological enemies to conveniently cooperate against the most immediate common security threat. Such convenient cooperation, however, is not built on the mutual political trust seen in other Asian allies, which reflects the convenient feature of the partnership. In major aspects, the convenient partnership is similar to the “quasi alliance” in the 1970s and 1980s, during which Washington and Beijing worked together to check the Soviet Union. Hanoi still perceives Western influence as posing challenges to its regime security. And to complicate matters further, under the pressure of the anti-communist Vietnamese American community, the condemns Vietnam’s poor human rights practices and may sanction Vietnamese officials under the Global Magnitsky it is exactly these weak spots in relations that afford Vietnam a strong bargaining leverage in the bilateral relationship. Although Vietnam is an autocratic state like China, the United States perceives Vietnam to be too important to its Indo-Pacific strategy to let issues concerning human rights or political differences derail the upward trajectory of the partnership. This creates a contradiction in foreign policy it wants to condemn China as an autocratic rival and to mobilize an alliance of democracies to check its rise, but it cannot alienate Vietnam at the same time. Consequently, Washington is actively trying to improve its ties with Hanoi, even to the point of overselling Vietnam’s importance like Mattis did, to be able to protect it from condemnations of other “different-minded” autocratic states. The wants to send a signal that Vietnam is not just another communist autocratic state, it is a close friend of efforts to improve the relationship to a strategic partnership is one of many concessions that it has made to Hanoi to solve the contradiction, as Washington can create legitimate exemptions to autocratic Vietnam when Vietnam is not treated as a adversary. For example, the has not sanctioned Vietnamese officials the way it has sanctioned Chinese officials for alleged human rights violations under the Magnitsky Act. It does not denounce the VCP the same way it has denounced the Chinese Communist Party or communism as a whole. The official motto is to build a “strong, independent, and prosperous Vietnam,” not a democratic remarkably has not sanctioned Vietnam under CAATSA even though Vietnam was among the top five Russian arms buyers from 2015 to 2019. On the contrary, Washington seems to be fine with its important partners using Russian arms, as in the case of its transfers of Soviet-made arms to Ukraine, if the partners use those arms to balance against adversaries. The wants Vietnam to buy more of its arms, but if Hanoi can better use Russian equipment than American due to the legacy of relying on Soviet-made arms, the will not put great pressure on it to conflicts arise, the tended to quietly work with Vietnam or to turn a blind eye rather than publicly challenge it. In January 2021, the Trump administration labelled Vietnam a currency manipulator, risking tensions. However, the Trade Representative shortly announced it would not take any punitive actions such as raising tariffs on imports from Vietnam. Six months later, the and Vietnam released a statement claiming that the two countries had solved the issue after “enhanced engagement.” In December last year, Vietnam along with Taiwan again exceeded the Treasury’s thresholds for possible currency manipulation, but Washington did not label it as a manipulator this time. The also largely overlooked the increasingly huge trade deficit with Vietnam while it was publicly upset with the deficit with China. Again, these special treatments are possible only when the actively tries to single out Vietnam as an important security partner from its avowed hatred for autocratic seems to well understand its strong bargaining leverage and thus its refusal to raise the relationship to the level of a strategic partnership is based on the confidence of its importance in the Indo-Pacific strategy. In other words, Vietnam’s reluctance does not hurt the positive outlook of relations. As State Department Counselor Derek Chollet put it in his recent visit to Vietnam, bilateral exchanges show “the ever growing strength of the United States-Vietnam relationship.” This explains why some Vietnamese officials claimed the partnership is already strategic in practice thanks to the current level of needs such leverage since it does not want to be perceived by China to be aligning with the while still wanting to keep its options open with the United States. It also wants to hedge against abandonment. The has maintained its neutrality in the South China Sea, and Vietnam does not expect Washington to risk a naval confrontation with China over the islands not vital to the survival of Vietnam or its other allies such as the Philippines. It is worth noting that South Vietnam did not receive military support when China occupied the Saigon-controlled Paracel Islands in in all, the special treatment to Vietnam fit its long tradition of prioritizing security interests over ideology in foreign policy, as the is willing to embrace autocratic regimes if it perceives those regimes to be sharing its security interests. If the partnership is important enough, the seemingly weak points in relations are counterintuitively beneficial to Hanoi because Washington will have to concede on those points as a part of its broader efforts to shield Hanoi from its attacks on other autocratic regimes. It is highly likely that the and Vietnam will address their differences quietly while publicly emphasize the progress made in the past three decades. Photograph Source Air Force – Public Domain As its forces mobilized on the borders of Ukraine, reports of substantial numbers of Russia’s draft-vulnerable men fleeing into exile flooded the US news media. Of particular relevance to the recent publication of my documentary memoir, Safe Return Inside the Amnesty Movement for Vietnam War Deserters, are the accounts of battlefield desertions by Russian soldiers following the invasion and now publicized as well with increasing frequency. Far from being despised in the US, these acts of resistance– not just the draft evasions, but the desertions as well – have been held in high esteem as expression of legitimate opposition to the Russian invasion . How, on the other hand, do we suppose the mass of Russian public opinion responds to accounts of Russian soldiers abandoning the battlefield? I suspect that the majority have viewed these acts much the way the US political and military establishments conflated resistance to an unjust war like Vietnam, over the course of which the incidents of desertion numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with how one would have expected those same deserting soldiers to act if their own land, their own homes were being attacked. Instead, in the conflated paradigm, the distinction between aggressive and defensive wars is collapsed, and American deserters were in the main denounced as misfits, shirkers, cowards or even traitors; Russians deserters are likely to be tarred with the same charges. In the meantime, we await how the outcome of the former Wagner commando’s – now a deserter – appeal for asylum in Norway will echo among his comrades in the trenches of Ukraine. The comparison here is imperfect, of course, since the Vietnam War ended five decades ago, and the war in Ukraine drags on, its outcome far from certain. It is likely to be some time before we learn the fates of those who deserted the Russian ranks or fled to foreign soil to evade conscription. We do know something about what befell those who evaded the draft or deserted active service during the long decade of the Vietnam/American War. A movement for amnesty was organized in the US demanding their reintegration and repatriation without penalty. I tell that story in part in my account of the activities of the Safe Return Amnesty Committee. I say in part, because Safe Return occupied one corner, albeit a prominent one, within the larger confines of the amnesty movement, and primarily concentrated its efforts on defending the deserters who had less support than the draft resisters among members of the public not militantly opposed to the war. Still, over the course of the roughly six years that the amnesty movement was active, late 1971 to early 1977, a good deal of public sympathy was eventually stirred for the American deserters. But when President Carter came to pardon draft resisters shortly after his inauguration in 1977, he left the resolution of those still in the active status of desertion to the whims of the military. The same solution was applied to all the dissident GIs already herded through the inquisitions of military justice and turned out with discharges that were less than honorable. Even congenitally centrist observers like the editors of the New Republic were wide eyed in acknowledging something fishy when reporting that those with “bad paper” numbered in the hundreds of thousands. To compound this stigma, a significant sector of legal and journalistic opinion, by no means entirely radical, held that the overwhelming majority of bad discharges involved offenses that would not be criminal in civilian society. Put it this way, that tainted label is not something you want on your resume when you go job hunting. The Vietnam antiwar movement was a qualified success in aiding to end the land war in Southeast Asia, an outcome the dysfunctional state of our own fighting forces – aka the GI Resistance – contributed to significantly. But the scope of antiwar movement’s influence was anything but socially transformative, and thus impotent to power a post-war amnesty movement, albeit partially vindicated in the case of the draft evaders, to transcend the taboos that virtually every society associates with desertion. Not even when the war the deserters fled from was almost universally held to have been at the very least a mistake, and in many minds a war of aggression, no less than the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The explosive rates of discontent in the ranks during the Vietnam-fueled fiasco did effect at least one obvious consequence. Shortly after the Peace Accords with Vietnam were signed in January 1973, the conscript US Army was replaced with an All-Volunteer Force, an even less democratic, some would say mercenary, arrangement for sharing the burden of military service than the draft. I expand on many of these themes in Safe Return an excerpt of which follows below. The book may be purchased from McFarland Books. Safe Return An Excerpt By late December 1971 I was already calling myself a revolutionary. A whole generation of New Leftists consumed by their opposition to the Vietnam War had come to define themselves in similarly provocative terms. As a state of mind this pretense was not entirely delusional. Only those activists most unhinged from material reality believed the United States was living a genuinely revolutionary moment. But revolutionary zeal had become rampant throughout the politicized youth culture. The axiomatic beliefs shared by many – perhaps most – radicals within this loosely knit, endlessly factious collectivity called the Movement held that the American political system was a sham, and that capitalism as a viable engine to achieve social and economic justice had been totally discredited. Equally in disrepute was liberalism, the idea that the system could be reformed at a steady and gradual pace, an ideological wolf in sheep’s clothing presenting a more comforting appearance for maintaining the status quo. Aim the first blow at the liberals Chairman Mao had advised his own revolutionary cadres; our group wasn’t Maoist, but we certainly had our issues about liberals. In the Movement we were known as CCI, short for Citizens Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Vietnam. Founded in the wake of public dismay over the revelation of the My Lai massacre in November 1969, CCI’s goal was to elevate popular awareness to the much greater scope of American atrocities in the war zone. Over the ensuing two years we’d had an amazingly good run, terrific coverage in the press and electronic media, with our two major accomplishments, a National Veterans Inquiry, and the rump Dellums War Crimes hearings on Capitol Hill, both subjects of books from mainstream publishers. We never did convince most Americans beyond radical veteran and Movement circles that war crimes committed by our troops were both widespread and a de facto consequence of the manner in which the war was being conducted, primarily against South Vietnamese civilians. CCI had claimed that American war crimes were a matter of policy inherent in tactics saturation bombing, free fire zones, forced removal of non-combatant civilians and destruction of their villages, and the systematic use of torture in the interrogation of detainees and prisoners. Looking back, I suppose that the most important contribution CCI made to the collective antiwar effort was to provide a forum for disaffected GIs like me who’d had their heads turned around in Vietnam and were inclined to tell that story to anyone on the home front willing to listen. By late 1971 the war crimes issue was a dead letter. Nixon had temporarily succeeded in demobilizing the antiwar movement with his policy of Vietnamization, the gradual withdrawal of American ground forces which, because victory now depended on the backed Saigon regime to battle on without American infantry, the press gruesomely described as “changing the color of the corpses.” It was a savvy political move. Clearly what had come to bother most Americans about the Vietnam War was its utter endlessness, not least the interminable images on the nightly news of GIs being stuffed into body bags and brought home in flag draped coffins. And still the war raged on with a full complement of American air and naval firepower at an intensity that was virtually undiminished despite the overall reduction in troops. Moreover, the field of hostilities would actually expand when both Laos and Cambodia, where covert war had been carried out for years, were openly invaded by American forces or their Army of South Vietnam surrogates. Far from “winding down,” from the Movement perspective the war had merely shifted into a phase that was likely to confuse, if not palliate, the mounting opposition among many so-called Middle Americans whose exhaustion with Vietnam had become a political obstacle to the Nixon administration’s hallucinatory dreams of “keeping” Indochina and sustaining the puppet regime in Saigon. It was in this atmosphere that in late 1971, Tod Ensign and I created Safe Return and entered the lists of the emerging Amnesty Movement. What most disturbed Tod and me, and many others in the not yet depleted ranks of the antiwar movement, was that, behind President Richard Nixon’s smokescreen of troop withdrawals, the public was being lured into a comfortable fiction that the role in the war was – or would soon be – over. Those informed feared worse. Tens of thousands of American troops still engaged in Vietnam combat in the early seventies, but the violence had now expanded openly throughout all of Indochina, with the relentless use of American air power as lethal to local populations as it had ever been. Looking for a new issue to prolong our own antiwar activism, Tod and I quickly shifted our attention to amnesty. We reasoned that a campaign positioned to anticipate a post-war political climate might become an adaptable vehicle for addressing a war vanishing from the headlines, but still far from over. If we had not yet come to see that advocating on behalf of veterans and GIs would define our political work in the years ahead, that trajectory was already evident when we created Safe Return. Thus, our orientation in this emerging movement would not be on behalf of those who’d refused to serve, but those who’d come to resist the war as a result of entering the armed forces. Once in uniform, many would run afoul of a draconian system of command dominated military justice and institutionalized racism, and in epidemic numbers deserted, some to foreign exile. On a wider political canvas, we demanded a universal amnesty without conditions for all those who resisted and were victimized by what we understood as an illegal war. We were certainly unambiguous in our public backing of resistance to the draft in any form, religious, philosophical, political or plain old self-interest. And while we acknowledged the sincerity of those who became conscientious objectors, we were arguing a unique position that would extend the blanket of amnesty over those who didn’t learn what was wrong with the Vietnam War until it was too late to avoid it. This was a class of men not schooled in religious argumentation or moral abstraction; a class of men who found no ready path to evade service through deferments, doctor’s letters, or informed political understanding; a class of men who would do the fighting and dying for 90% of their draft aged peers. There seems little doubt that, among the 10% of the draft age population who served, and the even smaller cohort who did the actual fighting in Vietnam, a majority of them, by any fair measure, came from the lower and marginalized strata of the working class. To the degree the politics we espoused at Safe Return had a consistent ideological edge, it was our espousal of class over moral politics. Over Safe Return’s lifetime, whatever the unique character and content of each campaign or action, our pitch for amnesty possessed a singular and consistent message to portray these many individual acts of defiance to military authority as a collective form of resistance. And such it was, we believed, in the temper of the times. Exactly how we fashioned that story line evolved with each successive episode of our trademark action, the voluntary surrender of a representative deserter under attention-getting circumstances tailored to each returnee an escapade in Paris, a surrender on the floor of a presidential convention, a caper on Capitol Hill, a Welcome Home Christmas Party under the nose of the FBI at a Greenwich Village jazz club. Subscriber OnlyMarch 15, 2022, 324 AM UTCUpdated onMarch 15, 2022, 658 AM UTCVietnam is poised to welcome international travelers on Tuesday but a lack of clarity on the rules of a wider reopening while the coronavirus is still rampaging is causing remains unclear what kind of quarantine and testing rules the Southeast Asian nation will impose on foreign visitors when it reopens after a two-year closure. It doesn’t help that Vietnam has been seeing a surge, with daily cases averaging about 165,000 in the past week through March 14. Subscriber OnlyGDP next year to expand 6% prime minister says WednesdayGovernment pledges flexibility to ease blockages, aid recoveryPhotographer Maika Elan/BloombergOctober 20, 2021, 304 AM UTCUpdated onOctober 20, 2021, 359 AM UTCVietnam’s prime minister said economic growth will accelerate in 2022 after undershooting expectations this year, as the nation aims to revive manufacturing and exports from a crippling coronavirus Pham Minh Chinh, speaking Wednesday at the opening of parliament’s fall session, forecast gross domestic product next year will expand in a range of 6% to

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