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Apple to ship 25 million iphones made in India to the US for the June quarter 2025, meeting 50% of US demand. This will reduce iphone tariff from 20% for China to 10% for India. Apple will take $900 million in added costs for the tariffs for the June quarter and higher costs for future quarters. Apple made 24.8 billion on $95 billion in sales for the 1st quarter of 2025.  Apple will not get the $20 billion payment it gets from Google for making Google search the default search engine on Safari web browser. This is 25% of Apple profit. A federal judge declared this payment illegal on antitrust grounds. Another federal judge has referred Apple's App policies for criminal contempt investigation. Apple has been late to recognize the dangers of concentrating production in one country. Eight years after the 2016 election won by DJT Apple has not corrected this concentration in one country. Apple has focused on proift alone ignoring the potential for education for it's products such as the iPad. The public perception of Tech companies is that Tech is all about profit alone without regard for the Nation, education, investment in American communities and jobs, and other needs. ...

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China's food imports have grown from $15 billion to a staggering amount of $200 billion a year in 2023. China bought 90 million tons of soyabeans in 2022 or 60% of world trade, to make tofu and feed pigs, much of it from Russia. Fruit imports have grown after the pandemic with bananas from the Philippines and Cambodia, Durian and tropical fruit from Vietnam, And soy imports from Russia, shrimp from India, avocados from Kenya. Huge warehouses the size of plane hangars are used to store Durian fruit in Vietnam and have made farmers there rich. The problem in central highlands of Vietnam is "singularification," where farmers rip up land used for coffee crops and rice to plant durian whose price has doubled for exports to China. Durian is only in demand in China, coffee prices are stable and can be exported all over the world for Vietnam's Robusta coffee.

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Lang Son, Vietnam, in the China-Vietnam border war of 1979. Residents talk of the destruction during that conflict. The VIetnamese government restored relations with China following the conflict. The situation has changed with differences over the South China Sea and drilling rights in the area claimed by both countries.

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How fast food is marketed in Vietnam's fast growing cities where the influx of migrant workers has increased the population of Saigon or Ho Chi Minh city to 10 million from 6 million in 2000. And per capita incomes are rising increasing to about $900 in 2007 from $600 in 2005 for Vietnam's 84 million people. The success of 2 chains Kinh Do and Pho 24 which have studied marketing of burgers in the Philippines and other fast food chains from the USA and now use these methods with distinctive local food and tastes typical to Vietnam.

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 FR24's Cyril Payen reports on the battle of Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam in 1954 marking end of French colonial rule in Indochina. Under Eisenhower administration and John Foster Dulles the Cold War with Soviets cast a shadow over the struggle for freedom from colonial rule of the Vietnamese people. After the French left in 1954 remaining American advisers cast a shadow over John F. Kennedy's new vision for the world that included freedom from colonial rule for Asia and Africa. Facing a struggle in Eastern Europe with Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956, US was unwillingly dragged into France's colonial conflict after Kennedy's assassination. Kennedy's vision for the New Frontier was never realized following a series of mediocre presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Obama and Trump that wasted resources in far away wars. America is only now recovering Kennedy's vision of the New Frontier of 1960. ...

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India faces tariff of 25% with policies of reliance on Russia for arms and oil,  Mexico Canada and South Korea face higher tariffs August 1 2025 as they are holdouts now that UK, Japan, EU, Indonesia, Vietnam have agreements with the US on trade.

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Nguyen Dan Que, is a doctor in Vietnam who has been imprisoned three times. Que was doing diabetes research in London during the 1970's. Three months after Mandela's release Que called for a nonviolent movement for basic rights and free elections in Vietnam. He was arrested a month later and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor.

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State owned shipbuilder Vietnam Shipbuilding Industry Group (Vinashin), defaulted on a $600 million loan in December 2010. Inflation is running close to 12% in December from a year earlier, and the Vietnamese currency, the dong, has lost a fifth of its value since mid- 2008. Vinashin borrowed heavily with the idea of becoming a leading shipbuilder, and nearly collapsed in mid 2010 with $4.4 billion in debts. Top executives were arrested for mismanagement of the company. Vietnam faces a problem faced by other emerging market economies in the past- it has only small foreign exchange reserves, which may be why it decided to let Vinashin default. The $14 billion the IMF reported for Vietnam as of September end 2010, is not enough to cover the short term debt of about $6-$7 billion and a wide trade deficit of $12 billion according to a credit markets strategist at UBS AG in Singapore. Experts say Vietnam has not learned from the lessons of other emerging market countries in Asia that faced a financial crisis in the 1990's. The central bank estimates credit will go up by 28% in 2010 over 2009. The government is focussed on growth, and experts are pessimistic about any changes at the coming party congress or in policies of the government. The Communist party promotes officials on the basis of their ability to hit growth targets and meet five year plans- with little regard for inflationary effects and corruption. One government official says the only thing the Communist party understands is growth and this is why little change can be expected. ...

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Apple relies on Chinese suppliers for about 90% of its products. So reliant is Apple on China that it is slow to make changes to adapt to president Biden's policies for a new US Asian Economic Framework that builds new supply chains. By contrast Samsung has largely stayed out of China using supply chain manufacturing in Vietnam and other countries. India and Vietnam are major alternatives and only India can offer the well trained workforce and supplies of land, labour, incentives and facilities that China offers. This makes Apple a laggard in the changes that are happening today to supply chains bringing manufacturing closer to home and making products in countries allied to the US in Asia. This includes South Korea, Japan, India and Vietnam as production hubs for parts and assembly of advanced technology products. Apple is only now beginning the task of building supply chains outside China and returning manufacturing to the US which will bring back US technological leadership by 2030, American policy set by president Biden. ...

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Biden tells the UN General Assembly he has seen the world since coming to the Senate in 1972 age 29. "Sweeping, aspirational, stubborn, defiant" says WSJ, 52 years later president Biden describes what was overcome- A long drawn war in Vietnam ended with America and Vietnam meeting as friends and partners this year showing there is path forward to reconciliation, to peace. Speaking out agains Apartheid in South Africa in the 1980's and seeing the racist regime fall. Peace in the Balkans and how he held Milosevic accountable for war crimes in the 1990's. And Afghanistan becoming longer than the Vietnam War, four presidents did not end it. "Four American presidents had faced that decision, but I was determined not to leave it to the fifth." How he has hope for the Middle East and Ukraine. “I have hope. It always seems impossible until it is done.”  ...

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"Escalation" is the word used which ignores that more American lives have been lost to fentanyl and drug trafficking in the US over the last 15 years than in the Korean, Vietnam and First World War combined. How could this have been allowed to happen is a question for all Americans.

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The new Southern Wall China is building along its borders with Burma and Vietnam. The border stretches for 3000 miles. Yunnan which borders Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos has allocated a half billion dollar fund to fortify security barriers on the border. To close the border for zero Covid-19 policy and protect China's southern gate 100,000 officials, police officers, soldiers and civilians are patrolling this border.

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The end of another long war in Asia that started in 1979 with Soviet forces followed by American forces- the war lasted for 44 years in a country of mountains with 38 million people. Just as with the Vietnam war that started in the sixties under president Kennedy and ended in the mid 1970's, yet even earlier than that in the 1950's with French colonial forces. That war lasted 25 years. It achieved little in terms of ideology as market capitalism now prevails in China and Vietnam. What it achieved was a single Vietnam under nationalist forces led by the Communists under Ho Chi Minh who was a student in Paris when the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1918, when he called for self determination in Indochina. That war had a parallel in the war from the 1930's to 1949 between Mao's communist forces and first the Japanese, then Chiang's Nationalist forces. The war in China lasted 20 years.  This ends a long chapter of anti colonial and anti western wars in Asia that covered most of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st. Asians are weary of wars just as much as the wars that divided Europe. Americans and Europeans have much to do to rebuild their economies and improve life in their countries. Asians have much to do to build infrastructure and a better life for their people. China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan have much to do after the pandemic.     ...

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The difference between US imports and exports is down from $418 billion in 2018 to $280 billion in last 12 months (August 2024 to July 2025) showing the impact of tariffs and policies of the DJT administration to level the playing field and for getting out of the trade deficits that hurt American jobs, workers, and communities. Tariffs of 20% for fentanyl issue and 125% made it 145% for import tariff on China after Liberation Day. These were lowered to 30% after trade talks. This where it stands today. 

The figure of $280 billion is higher because of transshipping by China through Vietnam- for transshipping the 20% tariff on Vietnam goes up to 40%. Another aspect of the figure of $280 billion is that it is last 12 months which reflects 5 months of the Biden administration, and the surge in imports before deadlines when DJT tariffs would come into place. Battery imports are up, smartphones, toys and apparel is down.

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Questions readers raise about Lewis Sorley's account of wins in the latter part of the war in Vietnam. The idea presented that had the country stood behind the war effort it could have been turned around. Here President Johnson's own deputy national security advisor, Francis Bator, who is Professor emeritus at the Harvard Kennedy School, refutes this notion by saying that: "in Vietnam the goal was clear but unattainable by any means not grossly disproportionate to the American stake." He goes on to say that false inferences from that failure will not help President Obama with the hard question of deciding what feasible goals and means in Afghnistan and Pakistan and other places will minimize chances of amajor terrorist attack on the United States, whaterver its origating location. And doing this in a cost-effective way. The wording is designed to first focus on what is the minimum that America wants- safety from another attack. Second, to focus on doing this in a cost-effective way. At some point resources added become disproportionate to the American stake in Afghanistan. An infantryman in the Vietnam war describes a people in villages that he was supposed to protect who would not even alert American soldiers of bombs when they knew exactly where they were placed. People in villages who were basically indifferent to the central government in South Vietnam. Are the Afghan people any different? See the links to this....

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The US sends aircraft carrier group of the US 7th fleet with the aircraft carrier USS Reagan and destroyers on a freedom of navigation mission through the South China Sea. What is a freedom of navigation mission and what is the US goal? "Our presence in the Pacific is to demonstrate our commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific," says commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, Captain Fred Goldhammer. Seen on a map the Paracel Islands are far from China's coast. They lie on the waters further south in the South China Sea closer to the coast of Vietnam and between Vietnam and the Philippines. Till 1974 the Paracel Islands were part of Vietnam. In that year China took control of these islands after a war with Vietnam. The name Paracel is of Portuguese origin on maps in the 16th century. There are 130 islands or reefs with total area of about 3 square miles spread out over about 6000 square miles of ocean in the middle of the South China Sea near the coast of Vietnam. The French had  weather station there in 1932. After independence South Vietnam controlled the islands. In 1974 the islands were taken over by China from Vietnam. The result is that by taking over the islands China put itself in the position it is in Tibet. In Tibet it has put itself right across the Himalayas in a position that interferes with security on the border with India in the Himalayas that for centuries almost going back to Buddhist times 2500 years ago had very little and most of the time no Chinese presence. The passes in the Tibetan region are at heights over 15,000 feet that were mostly inaccessible except by yaks and other animals for transport for most of the 2500 year period. This is true also of the Paracel and other islands in the South China Sea as they are right in the middle of the seas of open navigation used by traders before the coming of the Europeans and for ocean going trade since 1500. Britain and the US have enjoyed free and open navigation in these oceans which connect past the Philippines into the Pacific to the Japanese islands and on to Hawaii and the US Pacific coast. What the US and European allies are saying is that the free and open navigation of the seas has always been the case for the last thousand years in the Pacific. The taking of the islands in 1974 by China from Vietnam now put it up against the US and European allies, and their Asian allies, as it interferes with navigation in the open seas essential for trade and travel between Asia and the Pacific. This is how the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the taking over of the Paracel Islands have put China into the position of interfering in the normally open and free areas in the Himalayas and the Pacific. This is where the Quad group shares a common interest in preserving what always existed in history-  a free and open Pacific and a free and open Himalayas. It brings together the US, Japan, India and Australia which stretch all the way from the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean uninterrupted all the way through Indonesia to Australia and Japan and the US. From the Mediterranean through Egypt into the Indian Ocean all the way to the Pacific and the US keeping free and open seas for trade and navigation. Or across the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and the Pacific to the US. ...

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Dulles with closeness to Churchill assumed a benevolent perception of the British Empire in Asia even with the enormous suffering and lack of development in China and India from the policies of the British. Such perceptions continued under Kissinger/Nixon, and Reagan/Rumsfeld. John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's Secretary of State during the Cold War. He stated his ideas in Foreign Affairs in 1957 that were colored heavily by the China conflict (1949) Korean conflict (1950)  the Vietnam conflict (1954), the Hungarian Revolution (1956), and the struggle with the Soviet Union. Many of his ideas continued through the 1960's to the 1980's determining US policy in Vietnam, towards China and India, and in Rumsfeld's policies in the Middle East that involved the US in local and religious wars.  Dulles sought to respond to the aspirations of colonized nations in Asia - China, India, Vietnam- but lacked an understanding of the hundreds of years of colonial rule and suppression of freedom, increasing poverty by lack of investment in education, health and industry, faced by these countries in dealings with the British Empire.    ...