Cold War Entanglements, Third World Solidarities: Vietnam and Palestine, 1967-75

This is the first study to focus on Vietnam-Palestine relations from 1967 to 1975. In American foreign policy, Vietnam and Palestine became entangled via their allegedly shared susceptibility to Soviet influence. Such Cold War entanglements, however, had to contend with an emerging Third World movement of decolonial, anti-racist, pro-Indigenous solidarities, critical of the imperialist nature of both the US and the USSR. Using these two frames-Cold War entanglements and Third World solidarities-I trace the usage of "Vietnam" and "Palestine" as grounded, rhetorical signifiers, demonstrating how different actors co-constituted their own political positions in relation to these two capacious terms. The article ends with an interview with the Ambassador of the State of Palestine in Vietnam, Saadi Salama, theorizing how the past's Cold War, Third World Liberation period continues to haunt the present. Invoking Neferti Tadiar's concept of "divine sorrow," I suggest that an entanglement of temporalities has the potential to re-chart the political possibilities of those nation-states that have seemingly concluded their own national revolutions, such as Vietnam.