Hiding Behind the Humanitarian Label: Refugees, Repatriates, and the Rebuilding of America’s Benevolent Image After the Vietnam War

This article argues that as the United States attempted to salvage its image as a benevolent nation in the wake of the Vietnam War, a movement of Vietnamese refugees demanding repatriation challenged the notion that the evacuation of Vietnamese was a necessary rescue operation motivated by humanitarian concern. Via wire reports and communiqués, the Vietnamese government accused the United States of fabricating a humanitarian emergency in order to continue meddling in Vietnam’s affairs. In the broader picture of U.S. foreign relations, the repatriate issue threatened to undermine America’s efforts to rehabilitate its image of itself as a benevolent power at a time when the United States had lost credibility due to misguided policy decisions, atrocities committed by American troops during the Vietnam War, and the postwar embargo. Images of Americans embracing Vietnamese refugees served as a form of damage control as the United States sought to reclaim its moral authority, which had undergirded the benevolent image it had used to justify its intervention in Vietnam in particular and global dominance in general.