After The Cold War Essay

The Cold War was a conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, that also caused many damages to other countries such as Vietnam, that later got involved into their own

Cold War – North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam with its capital – Hanoi) against South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam with its capital – Saigon). Today, I’m going to be talking about the social and economical state of Vietnam after the Cold War.

I’m focusing on three main things that were affected after the Cold War, which are:

Investment and trade, agricultural production, and how Vietnam’s economy developed after the Cold War.

The first point I’m talking about is trade and investment. After the War ended, the

U.S. was the only country who actively helped Vietnam,

The U.S later served as a loan shark for Vietnam, giving out credits and loans from monetary institutions such as the World Bank, The

International Monetary Fund, and The Asian Development Bank.

Even though the U.S was of great help while rebuilding Vietnam’s broken society, they also were the cause of their resource shortage at the beginning. The U.S implemented a series of sanctions that meant that Vietnam was limited to the resources necessary to have proper agriculture. They limited the access to fertilizers and machinery. This damaged both their agricultural output and trade. Giving the fact that

Vietnam couldn’t properly harvest crops, they were unable to produce the sufficient amount of crops to trade with other countries, leading to an economical weakness in the agricultural sector (which was one of their strengths).

The final economical area I’m covering in this essay is how Vietnam’s economy developed and was affected by the Cold War. Trade and agricultural damaged its economy and were the main economical effects lead by the War, but there are

Not everything caused by the war was bad, the Vietnamese learned to implement new agricultural methods and new labor skills. They focused on what the consumer needed most and used the resources they had to try to rebuild their economy and their society.

To this day, Vietnam is still trying to recover from that economical loss they suffered from the War, but the social effects still have an impact on their population today.

During the War, the main problem was people fleeing Vietnam due to the conflicts that they were facing. This led to a major problem in immigration. When the war ended in

1975, there was a record of 2.5 million people between 1975 and 1995 leaving Vietnam to seek refugee in other countries.

Most found shelter in neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, and The

Philippines, others sought a brighter future and a fresh new beginning in the U.S.

There were many social effects caused by the Cold War in Vietnam. One of the most notable ones was the Communist Party taking control over Vietnam, which lead to economical disasters due to the way of ruling of the Communists. They only allowed trade with other Communistic countries and this resulted in a major depression.