Editor's Сhoice
Pentagon Campaign to Recruit Vietnam as Military Ally Against China Exposed Delusions of U.S. War Strategy
After convincing itself Vietnam would grant it access for missile bases against China, the Pentagon got a hard dose of reality.
By Gareth PORTER
When the Pentagon began gearing up for a future war with China in 2018, Defense Department officials quickly realized that they needed access to Vietnamese territory for troops armed with missiles to hit Chinese ships in a US-China conflict. So they initiated an aggressive campaign to lobby the Vietnamese government, and even Communist Party officials, in the hope that they would eventually support an agreement to provide them the permission.