TWENTY years ago socialists and internationalists were celebrating the historic victory of the Vietnamese people over the brute force of US imperialism.
The world thrilled to television pictures of the chaotic retreat from Saigon, the helicopters lifting the last US marines from the embassy roof, after years in which the same TV channels had relayed some of the misery and horror of the war.
The US defeat, and the collapse of its vicious puppet regime in South Vietnam, opened up a new period for struggles internationally.
Though they were outgunned by the huge US war machine, and left to fight alone by the Soviet and Chinese stalinist regimes, the unbroken resistance of the Vietnamese fatally cracked the morale of the US and puppet forces.
Faced with a growing mass monition against the war within the US itself, and the disintegration of its conscript army on the battlefields of Vietnam, the world's most powerful imperialist nation had been fought to a stand: still.
It was left no other course but retreat.
The following 15 years saw US global intervention shackled by the "Vietnam syndrome', the war-weariness, hostility to large-scale military intervention, and fears of another bruising defeat.
The Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions of 1979, both of which toppled key US strategic allies, were spared the immediate threat of US intervention. The half-cocked effort to free US embassy hostages in Iran without committing substantial forces proved a complete fiasco, and reinforced the 'Vietnam syndrome'.
Arms race
To hide this obvious weakness, in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, the military focus shifted from the threat to deploy mass forces of ground troops to the rapid build-up of war technology, escalating the arms race and the economic crisis with the deployment of Cruise and a new generation of ground-based missiles, new, more deadly nuclear submarines, new warplanes, and the 'Star Wars' anti-missile defence system.
It was not until the Gulf War that, under cover of the blue flags of the United Nations and a relentless aerial bombardment, the USA again felt safe to send large contingents of ground troops into action against a single, isolated enemy.
But while imperialism was weakened by the Vietnamese victory, the taking of Saigon was also seen as a threat to the 'peaceful coexistence' with imperialism which both the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies had hoped to maintain.
A hostile Soviet leadership set its face even more resolutely against any form of support for liberation struggles - in Central America, Southern Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere. It was made obvious from day one of the Nicaraguan Revolution that the Kremlin was not prepared to give the military and economic support to the Sandinistas which the Kruschev regime had given to Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution in Cuba.
But another stalinist regime was also forced to tread carefully after the Vietnam victory. Ho Chi Minh's government in North Vietnam did not wish to allow the Viet Cong forces which had battled so hard to defeat the USA to take power into their own hands in the South.
It was no accident that the tanks which completed the liberation of Saigon were manned by North Vietnamese regular troops and not by the National Liberation Front.
Ho's government took control, but did not hurry to expropriate capitalism in the South, waiting until the mass upsurge around the victory had died down, and political control had been firmly established, before moving to unify the country.
The economic and environmental devastation wreaked by a 25-year war on what had always been an underdeveloped country made it quite obvious that there could be no question of building 'socialism' in Vietnam alone.
Lacking adequate technological and economic support from the Soviet Union and China, while understandably reluctant to seek deals with imperialism, Vietnam remained caught in an impossible contradiction.
It is a sorry reflection of this that 20 years after their heroic struggles liberated their country from imperialist rule, the Vietnamese people, like the Chinese workers, denied trade union and other democratic rights, find major imperialist multinationals now eagerly setting up plants to exploit their cheap labour.
A new BMW plant in Hanoi is clearly not - Vietnam - all else the heroism and