By Merle Pribbenow
I was assigned to the US Embassy in Saigon when an acrimonious meeting between Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security advisor, and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu took place on 22 October 1972, sixteen days before the US presidential election. Kissinger was trying to force Thieu to agree to a ceasefire agreement he had negotiated privately with the North Vietnamese in Paris, without South Vietnamese government participation. This agreement did not require the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnamese territory and did not provide any clearly spelled-out security guarantees by the US government.[1]
Unlike the scene in the White House on 28 February 2025 that was televised live to the entire world, the heated argument between Kissinger and Thieu was conducted behind closed doors, largely invisible to the outside world. But there are uncanny similarities between the Kissinger-Thieu confrontation in Saigon and the one that took place 52 years later in the White House, during a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymar Zelenski and President Donald Trump, with Vice-President J.D. Vance and others in attendance. In both cases, the key point of contention was the effort by the United States to pressure a weaker ally (South Vietnam in the first case and Ukraine in the second) into entering into a ceasefire agreement with an implacable foe (North Vietnam in the first case and Russia in the second) without solid, clearly-enunciated US security guarantees that would be activated if the other side violated the agreement.
The strategy of the other side (North Vietnam in 1972 and Russia today) also appears to be very similar, with the aim in each case being to reach an agreement that would permanently end US military involvement/military support to its ally, leaving the other side free to resume the fighting and defeat a weakened opponent who has been stripped of the US support that it desperately requires.
The following is an excerpt from a 2004 Vietnamese publication that consists of a collection of articles written by a number of Vietnamese communist cadres and leaders who were directly involved in the 1972-73 peace negotiations.
The publication, which was prepared under the aegis of the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and edited by Vu Son Thuy, is titled The Diplomatic Front During the Paris Talks on Vietnam and was published by the National Political Publishing House, Hanoi, in 2004. Included in this work is an article written by Major General Doan Huyen, entitled “Defeating the Americans: Fighting and Talking.”
General Huyen writes that during the summer of 1972 he was assigned to a North Vietnamese Politburo strategic policy planning committee called CP50, which was responsible for formulating plans for North Vietnam’s negotiations with Washington to reach a peace agreement with the United States and its South Vietnamese ally. He says that in mid-September 1972, after South Vietnam’s armed forces, with heavy US air and naval gunfire support, finally recaptured Quang Tri City, the only South Vietnamese province capital to be occupied by North Vietnamese forces, he and his fellow author CP50 analysts recommended that the North Vietnamese negotiators should lower their goals for a peace agreement by abandoning half of their previous demands for an agreement. North Vietnam’s previous requirements for its agreement to a peace deal had been, first, a total withdrawal of all US military forces from the Vietnam conflict, and second, the replacement of the current South Vietnamese government with a “neutralist” coalition government.
General Huyen goes on to write:
We . . . recommended that we should lower our demands, to some extent at least, on the South Vietnamese political issue. This was an issue of great contention between our side and Kissinger, and it involved the governmental structure in South Vietnam: Should we require the establishment of a tripartite coalition government, a government of national reconciliation, or a Committee For the Peaceful Reconciliation of the Nation [an impotent quasi-governmental organization]?
CP50 Chief Nguyen Co Thach agreed with the way I and the other CP50 specialists had presented the problem. He briefed Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh and recommended that the Politburo meet to provide its thoughts on this matter.
On the day of the meeting, after participating in the Politburo discussion Thach returned and briefed us on the thinking of the Politburo and the decision it had made. Without providing any additional analysis of the situation, he told us of the conclusion that Communist Party First Secretary Le Duan had reached. Le Duan had said, “If we want to speed up the negotiations in Paris and sign an agreement before November 1972 (meaning before the US presidential election), we must concentrate our efforts on doing whatever it takes to resolve our primary objective, which is “to fight to force the Americans to withdraw.” The achievement of our first objective will create the conditions necessary for us to subsequently attain our second objective, “to fight to make the puppets collapse.” [Translator’s Comment: Duan was referencing the late Chairman Ho Chi Minh’s famous formulation of North Vietnam’s war strategy: “Đánh cho Mỹ cút, đánh cho nguỵ nhào.” [“Fight to make the American get out, fight to topple the [South Vietnamese] puppets”].
As a result, Thach said, during the upcoming round of negotiations our side had to firmly grasp the two requirements that we had to meet in order to attain our first [primary] objective:
- Completely and permanently end all US military involvement in South Vietnam; end the American war in South Vietnam; achieve the complete withdrawal of all American and satellite [allied] troops from South Vietnam; and end the bombing and mining of North Vietnam.
- [North] Vietnamese armed forces in South Vietnam would be frozen in the positions they currently held. Under no circumstances would North Vietnamese troops be withdrawn from anywhere, and under no circumstances would there be any regrouping and withdrawal of troops similar to what had been done under the terms of the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
The achievement of these two requirements would lead to the official recognition that, in practical terms, there were in fact two governments, two armies, and two zones of control [in South Vietnam].
This would create a new balance of forces that would be extremely favorable to our side and these favorable conditions would allow us to continue the struggle to achieve our second objective [emphasis added].[2]
The Taliban appears to have followed this same strategy in its negotiations with the first Trump administration. Those negotiations resulted in the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America,” signed by the Taliban and the Trump administration on 29 February 2020. That agreement, like the 1973 Paris agreement on Vietnam, was also negotiated separately between the United States and the other side (in this case, the Taliban), and without the involvement of the pro-US Afghan government. That agreement, like the “peace” agreement in Vietnam almost five decades earlier, was supposedly intended to bring peace to Afghanistan, first, through a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all US forces, followed by a negotiated peaceful “political settlement” between all the different Afghan parties. The ultimate outcome of the Afghanistan settlement, like the outcome of the January 1973 Vietnam peace agreement, was the complete defeat of our erstwhile allies and total victory for America’s opponents.[3]
It is interesting how the North Vietnamese strategy described above, like the strategy employed by the Taliban just five years ago, appears to uncannily parallel the ceasefire strategy that is currently being pursued by Russian President Vladimir Putin. He seems to have learned valuable lessons from the Soviet Union’s Vietnamese allies and from Afghanistan’s Taliban, while President Trump and his MAGA supporters appear to have forgotten (or to have intentionally ignored) the painful lessons that should have been learned by the United States from the ignominious outcome of the January 1973 Peace Agreement that the US forced upon its South Vietnamese ally.
Merle Pribbenow is a retired CIA operations officer and Vietnamese linguist who served in Vietnam 1970-1975.
[1] Kissinger provides a very short and very watered-down summary of his 22 October 1972 meeting with Thieu in Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extraction from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 364-366. For an admittedly biased South Vietnamese account of Kissinger’s confrontation with Thieu, see Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold Schecter, The Palace File (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
In addition, two backchannel messages summarizing the 22 October 1972 meeting between Kissinger and Thieu can be found here and here in the US State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. These summaries, however, fail to fully reflect the acrimony of the exchanges between Kissinger and Thieu.
[2] Vu Son Thuy, ed., The Diplomatic Front During the Paris Talks on Vietnam (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2004), 135, 139.
[3] For the official US State Department text of this agreement, click here.
©2025 by Merle Pribbenow
