Gotta give points for having a go. Tet was a defeat for the Viet Cong but as a propaganda exercise, it was a winner. Old Norodom S might have thought Cambodia was neutral but Kissinger, Nixon, the NVA and the KR sure didn't.

There's a few books out now making claims that these are the last days of the USA. Like Rome in 400 AD (or there abouts). Not so sure about that. Their (USA) ability to wage covert and overt war in half a dozen places, although messy, is tactically quite fascinating. Far from being in decline.

I reckon though if you want to go back to a 'tipping point' look at the last days of the Nixon administration and the helplessness of 'stagflation'. If that hits again as we approach 'peak oil' start learning Chinese quickly.

What a load of crap. Typical leftist propaganda by people who are still angry that their hero the soviet union fell on its own economic incompetance. The world is a better place without them.

One of the strengths of Marxism was an occasionally well reasoned analysis of power and the state etc.

Even that seems to have gone now.

I loved Peter Saunders' response. Did he actually read what John wrote, or does CIS stand for the Centre for Idiocy and Stupidty?

Where is John's praise for the imperialist Soviet Union? Nowhere. Pol Pot? Nowhere. Stalin? Nowhere.

John in the article specifically rejects the idea Vietnam was or is socialist. Nor does he suggest it is some economic miracle. However the vultures of Western profit are circling to take advantage of its low wages now that China is becoming too expensive. If that happens it too, like China, will move from state capitalism to market capitalism. The problem then for the Vietnamese dictatorship is that like China they will be creating their own gravedigger - the working class.

The overtrow of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and the occupied states of Eastern Eurpope shows a glimpse of the future - a future in which people rise up to get rid of their overlords and develop a society in which all can live comfortably without repression and in freedom and peace. The incomplete revolutions in Eastern Europe and the USSR were political not economic revolutions. The next chapter on this is yet to be written by the working class.

I was surpised that Saunders did not respond with some current economic analysis which argues that the decline of the US economically is overrated. This argument suggests that US economic power peaked in 1951 at 28% of world GDP and then declined to 21% in 1975, but that it has remained around that figure ever since. Of course the nature of what the US produces may have changed markedly, perhaps away from goods towards sevices.

I think the date John picks is hyperbole, and a journalistic device to remind people of the defeat of the US in Vietnam and of its inability to best the rebels in Iraq or Afghanistan. In my view the US has already lost in both countries.

And John's other point was that the ghost of Vietnam haunts the US ruling elite today. Why else do they not saturate Afghanistan and Iraq with troops and weapons?

America's world ascendancy is surely waning, but I'm not sure that the Tet offensive was the moment it began. America's inevitable decline will be a direct product of what made it so successful - i.e. global capitalism - as the mega-economies of China and South Asia expand exponentially.

At least until some of the more vital resources get scarce and the sh!t really hits the fan.

Having spent a fair bit of time in Vietnam in the last 13 years, including working there, it certainly is not a broken-down state. It is booming. And whether or not one likes the government and the corruption that is inherent everywhere, as eleswhere throughout Asia, there is some very good planning for the future going on. Vietnam also has some top quality professionals, and especially in the medical field. And their education system produces better results than ours; I have seen it. Funnily enough, Vietnam built its first university in 1066, at the time when the French thug William the Conqueror was bringing yet another genocide into Britain.

The reason VN didn't work too well after 1975 is simple.Firstly, after fighting continously for 30 years, it's dificult to get peace working for you when the infrastructure has been bombed to smithereens and 1 in 10 people have been killed. And in 1975 the USA and the rest of the world slapped a trade embargo on the place that only began to be lifted in 1989. VN also liberated Cambodia from Pol Pot's criminals, had a war with China because of it, and was obliged to maintain a standing army in Cambodia to make sure Pol Pot didn't come back. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was feting Pol Pot's thugs in the UN as the rightful rulers of Cambodia, because the good old USA, with the Chinese and Thais, was using them to get back at VN.And the VN population doubled between 1975 and 1995 to close to 80 million, in a country smaller than the Northern Territory.

I'm not interested in the left v right polemics. Vietnam has done very well, in contrast to PNG which, with 5 million people, a capitalist society if ever there were one, massive resources and all the best will in the world from aid donors, is a basket case undergoing self-inflicted Africanisation after "liberation" from its Australian "colonial oppressors" at the same time that VN kicked out the Americans.