Yankee, DO NOT Go Home, Please - Tom Friedman, de Kiev a Hanoi

Parece que a Doutrina Obama é a do retraimento, a de se desvencilhar dos problemas do mundo.

Mas o mundo não quer.  O mundo quer a presença americana.

Menos os companheiros, claro.

Esses preferem a companhia de russos, chineses, cubanos, essas maravilhas da democracia e dos direitos humanos.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

More Chopsticks, Please

The New York Times, May 10, 2014

Thomas L. Friedman

HANOI, Vietnam — BY an accident of scheduling, I’ve visited Kiev and Hanoi in the last couple weeks, and it’s been accidentally extremely revealing. Ukraine is a middle power living next to a giant bear, and Vietnam is a middle power living next to a giant tiger. Ukraine is struggling with how to deal with a declining Russia that is looking for dignity in all the wrong places — like in Crimea — and Vietnam is struggling with how to deal with a rising China that is looking for oil in all the wrong places — like in Vietnam’s territorial waters. Russia’s attitude toward Ukraine has been: “Marry me, or I’ll kill you.” And China’s toward Vietnam has been a variation of that line from “There Will Be Blood”: “I have a long straw, so I think I’ll drink my milkshake and yours.”

Meanwhile, America is trying to figure out how to buttress both Vietnam and Ukraine in their struggles with their giant neighbors without getting entangled in either dispute. And in my jet-lagged torpor, all I’ve been trying to do is make sure I don’t order Chicken Kiev in Hanoi and Chicken Spring Rolls in Kiev.

Both conflicts tell us a lot about the post-post-Cold War world. Neither Russia’s intervention in Ukraine nor China’s in Vietnam’s territorial waters is based on grand ideology or global aspiration. Both are about regional control, spurred by nationalism and resource competition.

Another similarity is that both Russia and China have not engaged in traditional crossborder aggression with their neighbors, choosing instead to operate behind cutouts. Russia used “little green men” in Ukraine — camouflaged pro-Russia gunmen whose identities are unclear — and China deployed a flotilla of 70 civilian vessels and just a few navy ships to the South China Sea. They towed a giant deep-sea drilling rig 130 nautical miles off the coast of Vietnam — well within Vietnam’s continental shelf but also in range of the disputed Paracel Islands that China claims are its own and therefore entitle Beijing to control a wide arc of surrounding waters.

Vietnamese TV has been airing an animated re-enactment of the confrontation: When a Vietnamese navy patrol boat challenged a larger Chinese vessel, it rammed the Vietnamese ship, wounding six sailors. Then another Chinese ship used a giant water cannon to shoo away the Vietnamese boats. It’s a huge story here in Hanoi.

In both cases, Russia and China used tactics firm enough to get their way but calibrated not to galvanize the international community to react much. China’s timing, though, right after President Obama’s visit to the region — when he criticized China’s expansive maritime claims — seemed to be a squirt gun in his face.

“It has been a real shock for the whole region,” Ha Huy Thong, the vice chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Vietnamese Parliament told me. “They use civilian vessels, and then if you attack them they say, ‘Why did you attack our civilians?’ ”

But Vietnam has limited options. China “is a rising power. The question is how can we deal with it?” said Thong. “It is not only a violation of our territory but of international law.”

The only way to deter such regional powers when they bully one neighbor is with a coalition of all the neighbors. But such coalitions are hard to build when the threat is to just one country, is relatively low level and when the threatening country (China or Russia) controls so much trade to the rest of Asia in the case of China and so much gas to Ukraine and Europe in the case of Russia.

 “We have a saying in Vietnamese,” added Thong: “It’s easy to break two chopsticks, but it’s very hard to break a bundle of them.” Until such a coalition gets built, Vietnam — in an irony of history — finds itself now looking to America for more protection from its historical predator, China.

Le Duy Anh, 24, a lecturer at Hanoi’s FPT School of Business (FSB), remarked to me when I visited his campus that whenever China does something to Vietnam these days people go to the American Embassy in Hanoi and demonstrate. For so many years, Vietnamese fought a war with Americans “trying to get you out,” he said, “and now we are demonstrating to get you to intervene. We don’t want bloodshed, so we need someone to tell someone else to calm down.”

So Americans may think we’ve lost influence in the world, but, the truth is, many people out here want our “presence” more than ever. This is especially true of those living on the borders of Russia and China, who are each sort of half in and half out of today’s globalization system — beneficiaries of its trading and investment regimes but revisionists when it comes to playing by all the rules in their own neighborhoods. We may not be so interested in the world, but a lot of the world is still interested in us — and saying: “Yankee come hither” more than “Yankee go home.”

We’re not going to go to war on either front. And Russia and China also have claims and interests that bear consideration. But if we are to persuade Moscow and Beijing to resolve these border disputes peacefully, not unilaterally, we’ll clearly need a few more chopsticks in our bundle. Which is why America’s ability to build coalitions is as vital today as the exercise of its own power.

Vietnam 1954: a guerra quase virou nuclear (BBC)

Could Vietnam have been nuked in 1954?

BBC, May 4, 2014, 20:35 GMT-3

Sixty years ago this week, French troops were defeated by Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu. As historian Julian Jackson explains, it was a turning point in the history of both nations, and in the Cold War - and a battle where some in the US appear to have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons."Would you like two atomic bombs?" These are the words that a senior French diplomat remembered US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asking the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, in April 1954. The context of this extraordinary offer was the critical plight of the French army fighting the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu in the highlands of north-west Vietnam.

The battle of Dien Bien Phu is today overshadowed by the later involvement of the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s. But for eight years between 1946 and 1954 the French had fought their own bloody war to hold on to their Empire in the Far East. After the seizure of power by the Communists in China in 1949, this colonial conflict had become a key battleground of the Cold War. The Chinese provided the Vietnamese with arms and supplies while most of the costs of the French war effort were borne by America. But it was French soldiers who were fighting and dying. By 1954, French forces in Indochina totalled over 55,000.

At the end of 1953, French commander in chief Gen Navarre had decided to set up a fortified garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, in the highlands about 280 miles from the northern capital of Hanoi. The valley was surrounded by rings of forested hills and mountains. The position was defensible providing the French could hold on to the inner hills and keep their position supplied through the airstrip. What they underestimated was the capacity of the Vietnamese to amass artillery behind the hills. This equipment was transported by tens of thousands of labourers - many of them women and children - carrying material hundreds of miles through the jungle day and night. On 13 March the Vietnamese unleashed a massive barrage of artillery and within two days two of the surrounding hills had been taken, and the airstrip was no longer usable. The French defenders were now cut off and the noose tightened around them.

It was this critical situation which led the French to appeal in desperation for US help. The most hawkish on the American aide were Vice-President Richard Nixon, who had no political power, and Admiral Radford, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Also quite hawkish was the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was obsessed by the crusade against Communism. More reserved was President Eisenhower who nonetheless gave a press conference in early April where he proclaimed the infamous "domino theory" about the possible spread of Communism from one country to another.

"You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly," he said. "So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."

Saturday 3 April 1954 has gone down in American history as "the day we didn't go to war". On that day Dulles met Congressional leaders who were adamant they would not support any military intervention unless Britain was also involved. Eisenhower sent a letter to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warning of the consequences for the West if Dien Bien Phu fell. It was around this time, at a meeting in Paris, that Dulles supposedly made his astonishing offer to the French of tactical nuclear weapons.

In fact, Dulles was never authorised to make such an offer and there is no hard evidence that he did so. It seems possible that in the febrile atmosphere of those days the panic-stricken French may simply have misunderstood him. Or his words may have got lost in translation.

"He didn't really offer. He made a suggestion and asked a question. He uttered the two fatal words 'nuclear bomb'," Maurice Schumann, a former foreign minister, said before his death in 1998. "Bidault immediately reacted as if he didn't take this offer seriously."

According to Professor Fred Logevall of Cornell University, Dulles "at least talked in very general terms about the possibility, what did the French think about potentially using two or three tactical nuclear weapons against these enemy positions".

Bidault declined, he says, "because he knew… that if this killed a lot of Viet Minh troops then it would also basically destroy the garrison itself".

In the end, there was no American intervention of any kind, as the British refused to go along with it.

The last weeks of the battle of Dien Bien Phu were atrociously gruelling. The ground turned to mud once the monsoon began, and men clung to craters and ditches in conditions reminiscent of the battle of Verdun in 1916. On 7 May 1954, after a 56-day siege, the French army surrendered. Overall on the French side there were 1,142 dead, 1,606 disappeared, 4,500 more or les badly wounded. Vietnamese casualties ran to 22,000.

In this year marked by two other major anniversaries - the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and the 70th anniversary of D-Day - we should not forget this other battle that took place 60 years ago. In the history of decolonisation it was the only time a professional European army was decisively defeated in a pitched battle. It marked the end of the French Empire in the Far East, and provided an inspiration to other anti-colonial fighters. It was no coincidence also that a few weeks later a violent rebellion broke out in French Algeria - the beginning of another bloody and traumatic war that was to last eight years. The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honour it felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in 1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the generals condemned as a "diplomatic Dien Bien Phu". This putsch brought back to power Gen de Gaulle who set up the new presidential regime that exists in France today. So the ripples of Dien Bien Phu are still being felt.

A memorial in Dien Bien Phu commemorates the French soldiers who died there

It was also in 1954 that France began working on its own independent nuclear deterrent.

For the Vietnamese, however, Dien Bien Phu, was only the first round. The Americans, who had refused to become directly involved in 1954, were gradually sucked into war - the second Vietnam War - during the 1960s.

Listen to The Siege of Dien Bien Phu written and presented by Julian Jackson on the BBC iPlayer

Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

BBC © 2014

Nacionalismo aquatico: a psicultura nacional contra o bagre vietnamita

O bagre já foi um contencioso nas relações EUA-Vietnã, sempre no sentido protecionista. O Brasil segue o mesmo caminho...

Peixe contrapõe ministérios
Mariana Mainenti
Correio Braziliense, 23.08.2010

Um peixe está sendo motivo de discórdia dentro do governo federal. Pressionado há três meses pelos produtores nacionais que estão tendo indigestão com a entrada do bagre vietnamita no país a preços abaixo do mercado brasileiro, o ministro da Pesca e da Aquicultura, Altemir Gregolin, prometeu há duas semanas solicitar ao colega da Agricultura, Wagner Rossi, a suspensão das importações enquanto faz uma análise do risco do produto. A iniciativa de Gregolin, no entanto, foi freada por um terceiro ministério, o das Relações Exteriores, que alertou as outras pastas envolvidas para um fato que agora parece ser maior do que o problema do pangasius(1): uma medida como essa poderia prejudicar as relações entre os dois países.

“O Itamaraty nos chamou a atenção para a questão de que a corrente de comércio entre o Brasil e o Vietnã saltou de US$ 60 milhões para quase US$ 1 bilhão (1.567%) nos últimos quatro anos. A importação do pangasius é pequena dentro disso. Agora, estamos tentando dentro do governo encontrar formas de resolver o problema sem prejudicar as relações do Brasil com o Vietnã”, disse ao Correio o secretário-executivo do Ministério da Pesca, Cleberson Zavaski.

Diplomatas examinam com técnicos do Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio Exterior formas de tratar a questão dentro das regras estabelecidas pela Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC). Eles avaliam se, em vez de suspender as importações do pangasius do Vietnã, o país poderia adotar procedimentos de salvaguarda, medidas antidumping ou elevação das alíquotas de importação.

Enquanto o peixe vietnamita — que gosta mesmo é de água doce — fica nadando nesse mar de possibilidades, não é confortável a situação do ministro da Pesca, cada vez mais pressionado pelo setor, que questiona as condições do produto para o consumo. “O peixe brasileiro é criado em águas limpas, o do Vietnã vem do Rio Mekong, que é poluído”, disse o presidente do Conselho Nacional de Pesca e Aquicultura (Conepe), Fernando Ferreira, que virá a Brasília novamente hoje para uma reunião na qual irá cobrar de Gregolin uma solução.

Substância proibida
O setor afirma que os produtores no Vietnã adicionam tripolifosfato de sódio, uma substância branqueadora que também faz o peixe “inchar” porque provoca retenção de água. O uso dessa substância é proibido pelo Ministério da Agricultura no Brasil. A eliminação dela pelos sistemas de esgotos sem adequado tratamento causa elevação da concentração de fósforo nas águas, o que acarreta a proliferação de algas. Em excesso, esses organismos usam grandes quantidades de oxigênio e evitam que os raios de sol entrem na água, prejudicando a sobrevivência dos peixes.

De acordo com o secretário de Monitoramento e Controle da Pesca e Aquicultura, Eloy de Sousa Araújo, na análise do risco do produto que o ministério está fazendo são levados em conta os riscos ao meio-ambiente. “Analisamos até mesmo as caixas do produto que chegam do Vietnã, para ver se há algum resíduo que possa provocar contaminação após o descarte da embalagem”, explicou.

Segundo o secretário, o ministério já fez este ano a análise de risco do salmão chileno, cuja conclusão foi de que o produto tem nível de qualidade adequado. Nesse caso, não houve suspensão das importações durante a análise, mas agora um acordo de cooperação entre as pastas da Pesca e da Agricultura permite que as duas medidas sejam tomadas em paralelo.

1 - Invasão perigosa
O pangasius é um peixe de água doce que, no Brasil, é conhecido como bagre. De janeiro a junho deste ano, o Brasil importou 3.300 toneladas do pangasius do Vietnã. O setor alega que há produtos similares nacionais, vindos, inclusive, da aquicultura familiar, como o mapará e a piramutaba, na Amazônia. O peixe do Vietnã entra no Brasil a US$ 2 o quilo, enquanto o brasileiro pode custar até o dobro do preço. Segundo o presidente do Conepe, depois da entrada do pangasius do Vietnã no Brasil, 3 mil funcionários já foram demitidos em indústrias de Santa Catarina e 2 mil na Região Norte