The Nationalists Defeat the Communists Without Firing a Shot

...not yet...but trending?

One of the great global political failures of the last century and a half—a failure drenched with blood and suffering—is Communism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, roughly 178 years ago. History has measured it and found it wanting. It is hanging on in corners, but it is a spent force on the global stage.

Communism isn’t dead. Though it fails everywhere it is tried, its adherents still survive in academia and left-wing parties around the world (NYC just elected one as mayor), but you can count the nations remaining under the yoke of that disproven theory on one hand: The People’s Republic of China (PRC), Cuba, North Korea, and Laos.

Did you think I missed one there? Well…not anymore.

OK, I’m stretching a bit there, but even more than the PRC that still uses Marxist/Maoist word salad, Vietnam seems to be in the process of changing to something that, well, isn’t communist at all, though the Communist Party is still the only power in control.

The Communist Party in the nations it took power was good at creating bureaucracies and nomenklatura inside a one-party state. There is a lot of institutional mass there that, even if the underlying political philosophy is defunct, can keep going to serve the state, whatever flavor that state may be.

When communism fell in Europe as a basis for government, there was a transition to representative government and freedom for some former Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and former Warsaw Pact members (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria). Another cohort devolved into kleptocracies (Moldova and Ukraine), one, Belorussia (as I prefer to call her), a Russian client state. The kleptocracies are trying to drift west, but that story has yet to be finished. The successor nations following the breakup of Yugoslavia have, to different degrees, successfully made the transition to Western, or Western-adjacent systems. Even Serbia has in the last few years.

That isn’t what happened to the Asian former Soviet republics; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The former communist nomenklatura mostly staying in power as they drifted towards different degrees of one-party state authoritarianism along the spectrum from not-so-bad Kyrgyzstan to comic-opera Turkmenistan.

We’ve all watched the PRC morph into something unique to it, but there are even more interesting things happening in Vietnam that everyone in the more-free world should welcome.

Stephen B. Young and Bradley A. Thayer over at American Greatness take things a bit further than I would (one must be careful of excessive optimism), but you can draw a trend-line here that is not insignificant.

…Vietnam’s new General Secretary of the Communist Party, To Lam, has replaced Marxist-Leninism as the Party’s governing ideology with something more authentically Vietnamese: Truong Ton Dan Toc, or “Vietnamese nationalism.”

That is a bombshell. Hanoi has just abandoned its Communist ideology, which governed it since 1954 and sustained it in its wars against the United States and its ally South Vietnam, and with its Communist neighbors, Cambodia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

…

In his speech of April 27, 2025, To Lam presented his party as one dedicated to Vietnamese nationalism, not Marxist-Leninism, saying that honor will always be given to those who sacrificed for the Vietnamese people’s “happiness and prosperity” and “their truong ton and development.” He added that, today, all Vietnamese—no matter where they live—have the same ancestral mother, Au Co, and are equally “children of dragons and grandchildren of angels,” and affirmed that all Vietnamese—no matter where they live—should contribute to the future of “their” people, not to the imposition of an ideology.

To Lam called for a new Vietnam, for a new era in Vietnamese history, one possessing “peace, wealth, civilized education, development, and pure Vietnameseness.”

A few days later, on May 4, 2025, the Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party adopted Resolution 68, putting private enterprise at the center of economic development.

…

The rights of private property will be guaranteed and protected. The Vietnamese state will henceforth “serve and support” private enterprise and not contradict the “principles of the market.”

Finally, on October 6, 2025, in remarks opening the 14th session of the Central Committee, General Secretary To Lam made no mention of Marxist-Leninism and only one passing reference to “markets oriented towards socialism.” Rather, again, he emphasized “strategic self-mastery, self-effort, and self-empowerment” as the Party’s chosen path to a prosperous Vietnam.

One-party states do not give up power easily, and rarely give up power bloodlessly—but it is not unheard of. Most of Eastern Europe managed to do so, +/- a firing squad or tank-squashing aside.

Vietnam is not going to be a representative democracy overnight, but if you are looking for trends, this is a good one. Every person I have talked to who has been to Vietnam in the last couple of decades has nothing but great and positive things to say about the Vietnamese people and their view of the U.S.A.—especially considering the late unpleasantness of previous generations. It is not a NORK-like hermit kingdom.

This move is good for the Vietnamese people, good for Southeast Asia, good for the United States, and in general—the human condition.

Let’s all wish the Vietnamese people the best in their journey and support them as we can.