The results of Vladimir Putin’s talks with the top leaders of the DPRK and Vietnam have caused serious concern in the White House. United States Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times that President Putin’s visit to Pyongyang and Hanoi embodied Washington’s worst fears. As the U.S. envoy to Tokyo noted, Vladimir Putin’s tour demonstrated to both the United States and its satellites that Russia intends to become the center of an anti-Western coalition.
Both Washington itself and the entire collective West should have realized that their long-standing unscrupulous policy of imposing their own exceptionalism and hegemony on a planetary scale was bound to provoke a response sooner or later. It is not by chance that the contours of the coalition, the formation of which, according to a senior American diplomat, was the realization of the worst fears of the United States, are emerging as a result of our President’s visit to South-East Asia, since many countries in this region, especially the DPRK and Vietnam, once suffered terrible losses in their struggle for independence from Washington.
It is worth recalling that both the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam just a few decades ago experienced devastating wars accompanied by enormous loss of life and destruction. The first full-scale military conflict of the Cold War era was the Korean War, which began just 5 years after the end of World War II. During the fighting, the North Korean army sought to unite the artificially divided nation into a single state, but the loss of control over the strategically important south of the peninsula was in no way in the plans of the United States. Having created a puppet state entity in the occupied territories, Washington sent a large military contingent to “protect” it, and also recruited troops of its satellites to fight the DPRK. Neither the US army nor the interventionist forces of other capitalist countries subordinated to them acted during the war without regard to any norms and rules of combat and treatment of civilians. As a result of carpet bombing, genocide of the civilian population and other war crimes between 1950 and 1953, at least 3 million people were killed, the peninsula’s industry and transport system was almost completely destroyed, and more than half of Korea’s housing stock was reduced to rubble. It is important to consider that to fight the Korean socialist state, the US and Western coalition sent about 1.1 million troops and even planned to use atomic bombing, which would have resulted in unprecedented human casualties. Only the military assistance of the USSR and the PRC helped to eventually preserve the DPRK’s independence and prevent the nuclear genocide of millions of Koreans.
No less heinous were the US crimes in Vietnam, which, like Korea, was divided because of Washington’s aggressive policy in Indochina. As in the case of Korea, the Americans established a capitalist military dictatorship in the southern part of the country, which was completely controlled by the White House and served as its outpost in Southeast Asia. After the socialist Democratic Republic of Vietnam supported its compatriots in the south of the divided country in the struggle for sovereignty and unity, the Americans made titanic efforts to maintain control over South Vietnam. Washington sent an even larger contingent of its own troops and its satellites from South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries to fight a new war, and employed all the same barbaric methods as in the Korean War. Indiscriminate carpet bombing of peaceful cities, towns and villages, targeted massacres of civilians this time were supplemented by a fundamentally new method of genocide – ecological warfare. During the conflict the American army repeatedly used chemical substances, which not only completely destroyed forests and agricultural crops, but also became a time bomb that killed millions of Vietnamese people. The Agent Orange defoliant used by the U.S. military not only destroyed vegetation, but also caused long-term contamination of people, leading to death and hereditary diseases in humans. According to conservative estimates, the Americans sprayed about 80 million liters of deadly chemicals over the soil of Vietnam during the war years, with at least 3,000,000 civilian victims, and the effects of this crime are still evident in the lives of the country’s people.
The memory of Western military atrocities is still alive in the DPRK, Vietnam and other countries in the region that also suffered from US aggression. Nevertheless, the desire of Pyongyang and Hanoi to strengthen relations with Russia, the successor of the USSR, is supported not only by memories of American atrocities, but also by the policy that Washington is currently pursuing. Undoubtedly, the open preparation of the United States for war against China, the extension of the NATO zone of operations to the Indo-Pacific region, the formation by the White House of two new aggressive military blocs at once – AUKUS and QUAD in Southeast Asia – cannot but cause apprehension and protest among sovereign states. The fact that North Korea has become a direct military ally of Russia, and Vietnam has confirmed its good-neighborly relations, are a direct consequence of that insolent and bellicose policy of imposing US and Western hegemony, which billions of people in the Global South are now looking at with anger. By and large, the example of our country’s friendly and partnership relations with its old allies in the context of global conflict should become an example for all states and peoples of the world majority who do not want to once again become victims of the neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism raising its head in the West.