From Hanoi to Hiroshima: Reflections on an Historic Trip
Last week, President Obama took a trip to Vietnam and Japan that began and ended in cities where America’s legacy has been shaped by war.
Of course, these two wars were extraordinarily different, but the one common thread in the trip was the overwhelmingly warm welcome that we received in both places.
Vietnam
In Vietnam, millions of people lined the motorcade route to welcome President Obama in scenes that none of us who were travelling will ever forget.
Over the course of three days, President Obama elevated our partnership with Vietnam, and engaged with the Vietnamese people in a way that would have been unthinkable in the aftermath of the Vietnam War — meeting several Vietnamese leaders, lifting a prohibition on arms sales, witnessing a number of significant commercial deals, welcoming an agreement to launch the Peace Corps and establish a Fulbright University, discussing innovation and TPP with young entrepreneurs, and speaking to participants in our Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative at a town hall meeting.
President Obama was also able to meet with members of Vietnamese civil society, although he voiced his concern that not everyone who was invited to the meeting was permitted to attend. That said, just the fact of holding that meeting in Hanoi was unprecedented, and allowed us to lift up the importance of civil society, while also being frank about the need for continued progress.
We believe deeply that engagement allows us to have those conversations, whereas isolation only locks us out of the room.
Indeed, the value of engagement with the Vietnamese people was evident the next day when the President — with some help from a Vietnamese rapper — was able to demonstrate the importance of free expression at an event that was viewed by 2 million people on Facebook.
Japan
Hiroshima was a very different kind of stop. He did not go to apologize, and Americans remain rightly proud of our defense of freedom in World War II.
But as the first American President to visit the city that was destroyed by the atomic bomb, President Obama was able to speak about the urgency of pursuing a world without nuclear weapons, and the necessity of finding alternative pathways to peace given the enormous costs of war.
Over the course of our trip, the President continually reworked his speech, consistently making it a broader reflection on what we must learn from history, and combining a profoundly realist message about mankind’s impulse towards conflict with an idealistic call for nations — and peoples — to see beyond their differences to “the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family.”
It is easy to respond to those words with cynicism. After all, there are many examples around the world of how we are falling short of that ideal. But then there is also the example of what we saw and experienced on the President’s trip — visiting two nations that are profoundly different from our own in their culture and history, with whom we fought two of the most brutal conflicts of the 20th century.
Today, Vietnam is an emerging partner, and Japan is our stalwart ally and friend.
And in the young people in the audience in Ho Chi Minh City, or in the hibakusha — atomic bomb survivors — that the President met in Hiroshima, it was not at all hard to identify our common humanity.
