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Milestone: Russia, North Korea Begin First Road Bridge Construction

Moscow says the project will boost trade and highlight the two countries’ strong alliance. Russia and North Korea have begun construction of their first-ever road bridge on the Tumen River, which forms the natural border between the allied countries, describing it as a symbol of their deepening partnership. Announcing the project on Wednesday, Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said it would reduce transport costs, facilitate trade and promote tourism. “This is truly a milestone for Russian-Korean relations,” Mishustin said during a video meeting with Pak Thae-song, chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly. “The significance goes far beyond just an engineering task … it symbolises our common desire to strengthen friendly, good-neighbourly relations and increase interregional cooperation,” he added. There is already a rusting, Soviet-era rail bridge across the Tumen River. “Another road will allow entrepreneurs to significantly increase the volume of transport [goods] and reduce transport costs – and, of course, open up good prospects for tourism,” said Mishustin. Russia’s Kommersant newspaper said the bridge will be ready by mid-2026. Russian state TV aired footage from the site, showing North Koreans dressed in suits, standing in line during a ceremony marking the start of construction. “It will become an eternal historical memorial structure symbolising the unbreakable Korean-Russian friendly relations,” North Korea’s Pak Thae-song said, according to a Russian translation. The governor of Russia’s Primorye region, Oleg Kozhemyako, who attended the ceremony, said he hoped it would boost contact between the countries. “There are many sportspeople and children going there,” he said, without elaborating.   North Korea and Russia, two of the most sanctioned countries in the world, have leaned into their alliance during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Pyongyang has repeatedly voiced strong support for Russia’s invasion and even sent thousands of its own troops to fight alongside the Russians. About 600 North Korean soldiers have died in the war, South Korean lawmakers said Wednesday, citing intelligence officials. North Korea is also accused by Kyiv of supplying Russia with heavy weapons it has used in battle, including a missile that killed a dozen people in Kyiv last week. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin signed a strategic partnership with Pyongyang last year that committed both countries to providing immediate military assistance to each other using “all means” necessary if either faces “aggression”. Putin has since hailed the North Korean troops fighting Ukraine, with the Kremlin even considering them parading on Red Square during World War II commemorations on May 9. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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Tearing Down: What Drives Trumps Foreign Policy?

Motivated by grievances against allies and foes, the US president is ‘tearing down’ the modern global order, analysts say. Washington, DC – Donald Trump’s world view can be difficult to pin down. During the first 100 days of his second term, the United States president started a global trade war, targeting allies and foes alike. He also issued decrees to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate and the World Health Organization, amongst other international forums. Trump continued to double down on a series of unconventional foreign policy proposals: taking over the Panama Canal, annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st US state and “owning” Gaza. And despite promising to be a “peace” president, Trump has said he intends to take the US annual Pentagon budget to a record $1 trillion. He has distanced himself from neo-conservative foreign policy and does not position himself as a promoter of human rights or democracy abroad. His “America First” stance and scepticism of NATO align with realist principles, but his impulsiveness and highly personalised diplomacy diverge from traditional realism. At the same time, he has not called for a full military or diplomatic retreat from global affairs, setting him apart from isolationists. So what exactly drives Trump’s foreign policy? Experts say it is primarily fuelled by a dissatisfaction with the current global system, which he sees as unfairly disadvantaging the US with its rules and restrictions. Instead, Trump appears to want Washington to leverage its enormous military and economic power to set the rules to assert global dominance while reducing US contributions and commitments to others. “The Trump doctrine is ‘smash and grab’, take what you want from others and let your allies do the same,” said Josh Ruebner, a lecturer at Georgetown University’s Program on Justice and Peace. Mathew Burrows, programme lead of the Strategic Foresight Hub at the Stimson Center think tank, said Trump wants US primacy without paying the costs that come with that. “He’s withdrawing the US from the rest of the world, particularly economically,” Burrows, a veteran of the US Department of State and CIA, told Al Jazeera. “But at the same time, he somehow believes that the US … will be able to tell other countries to stop fighting, to do whatever the US wants,” he said. “Hegemony just doesn’t work that way.” Trump appears to believe that threatening and imposing tariffs – and occasionally violence – is a way of employing US leverage to get world leaders to acquiesce to his demands. But critics say the US president discounts the power of nationalism in other countries, which prompts them to eventually fight back. Such was the case for Canada. After Trump imposed tariffs and called for Canada to become the 51st state, this led to a wave of nationalist pride in the northern neighbour and an abrupt shift from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party. From Canada to China, foreign governments have accused Trump of “bullying” and blackmail. Some of Trump’s Democratic rivals have rushed to accuse him of abandoning the US global role, but at the same time, the US president has been projecting American strength to pressure other countries. While not entirely isolationist, his approach marks a significant turn from that of his predecessor. The late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said in 1998: “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” That purported power and wisdom, as Albright envisioned, put the US in a position to implement Pax Americana – the concept of a peaceful global order led by Washington. Trump does see the US as proverbially taller than other nations, but perhaps not in the way Albright meant. “America does not need other countries as much as other countries need us,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this month. Her statement, however, was to stress that other nations must negotiate with the US to avoid Trump’s tariffs. In this context, Trump is seeking revenues and jobs – not an international system governed by liberal values in the way that Washington defines them. However, Burrows said the chief aim of Trump’s foreign policy is to dismantle the existing global order. “A big part of his world view is really his negative feelings towards the current order, where others appear to be rising,” Burrows said. “And so, a lot of this is just tearing down.” Much of the system that manages relations between different countries was put in place after World War II, with the US leading the way. The United Nations and its agencies, the articles of international law, various treaties on the environment, nuclear proliferation and trade, and formal alliances have governed global affairs for decades. Critics of Washington point out that the US violated and opted out of the system where it saw fit. For example, the US never joined the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court in 1998. It invaded Iraq in 2003 without United Nations Security Council authorisation in an apparent breach of the UN Charter. And it has been providing unconditional support to Israel despite the US ally’s well-documented abuses against Palestinians. “The United States has done a lot to stand up sort of multilateral institutions – the UN and others – that are based around these ideas,” said Matthew Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. “But the United States has always found ways to violate these norms and laws when it when it serves our purposes,” he added, pointing to former US President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and President George W Bush’s policies after the 9/11 attacks, which included extraordinary rendition, torture, invasion and prolonged occupation. But for Trump and his administration, there are indications that the global order is not just to be worked around; it needs to go. “The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators during his confirmation hearing in January. Trump recently told Time Magazine that the US has been “ripped off” by “almost every country in the world”. His rhetoric on foreign policy appears to echo his statements about promising to look after “America’s forgotten men and women” who have been mistreated by the “elites” domestically. While the modern world order has empowered US companies and left the country with immense wealth and military and diplomatic might, Americans do have major issues to complain about. Globalisation saw the outsourcing of US jobs to countries with less expensive labour. Past interventionist policies – particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – are largely seen as strategic blunders that produced a generation of veterans with physical and mental injuries. Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a centre-right think tank in Washington, DC, noted that wages have stagnated for many Americans for decades. “The fact is that the benefits of globalisation were very maldistributed, and some people up at the top made enormous plutocratic sums of money, and very little of that flowed down to the mass of the working class,” Kabaservice told Al Jazeera. For people who saw their factories closed and felt like they were living in “left-behind areas”, electing Trump was “retribution” against the system, Kabaservice said, adding that Trump’s “America First” approach has pitted the US against the rest of the world. “America is turning its back on the world,” Kabaservice said. “Trump believes that America can be self-sufficient in all things, but already the falsity of this doctrine is proving true.” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a think tank that promotes diplomacy, said Trump’s foreign policy, including his approach to allies, comes from “the politics of grievance”. “He does believe that the United States – because of its role as world policeman, which he’s not necessarily in love with – has been shouldering a lot of the security burden of the world without getting proper compensation,” Parsi told Al Jazeera. The US president has been calling on NATO allies to increase their defence spending, while suggesting that Washington should be paid more for stationing troops in allied countries like Germany and South Korea. So how does Trump view the world? “He’s an aggressive unilateralist, and in many ways, he’s just an old-school imperialist,” Duss said of Trump. “He wants to expand American territory. He wants to extract wealth from other parts of the world … This is a kind of foreign policy approach from an earlier era.” He noted that Trump’s foreign policy is to act aggressively and unilaterally to achieve what he sees as US interests. Kabaservice said Trump wants the US to return to an age when it was a manufacturing powerhouse and not too involved in the affairs of the world. “He likes the idea that maybe the United States is a great power, sort of in a 19th-century model, and it lets the other great powers have their own sphere of influence,” he said. Kabaservice added that Trump wants the US to have “its own sphere of influence” and to be “expanding in the way that optimistic forward-moving powers are”. This notion of an America with its own “sphere of influence” appeared to be supported by Rubio when he spoke earlier this year of the inevitability of “multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”. Parsi said that Trump is seeking hemispheric hegemony above all, despite his aversion for regime change – hence his emphasis on acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal. “You’re shifting not from the politics of domination towards restraint; you’re shifting from the politics of global domination to a more limited form of domination,” Parsi told Al Jazeera. “Focus only on your own hemisphere.” The US may have already experienced what happens when these views of nostalgia and grievance see real-world implications. Trump’s erratic trade policy rocked the US stock market and sparked threats of counter-levies from Canada to the European Union to China. Eventually, Trump postponed many of his tariffs, keeping a baseline of 10 percent levies and additional importing fees on Chinese goods. Asked why he suspended the measures, the US president acknowledged that it was due to how the tariffs were received. “People were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,” he said. Ultimately, Trump’s unilateralism and unpredictability have “broken the world’s trust in significant ways” that will outlast his presidency, Kabaservice told Al Jazeera. “In the broad span of history, Trump will be seen as the person who committed terrible unforced errors that led to the end of the American century and the beginning of the Chinese century,” he said. During his inauguration speech earlier this year, the US president said his legacy “will be that of a peacemaker and unifier”. “His actual legacy will be that he has torn down the global system that the US created,” said Burrows, of the Stimson Center. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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Fall Of Saigon: Children Of Vietnams War Refugees Reconcile A Painful Past

A younger generation of Vietnamese make peace with history and identity on the 50th anniversary of war ending in Vietnam. Vietnam: 50 Years of Forgetting - fixed version Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Although a child of war refugees, Victoria Ngo got to learn more about her Vietnamese identity only during her college years in the United States in the 1990s. The eldest daughter in a refugee family with a Vietnamese father of Chinese descent, Ngo grew up in a Chinese-speaking community in the US and for a while thought of herself essentially as just Chinese. As an inquisitive schoolgirl, Ngo had noticed the differences, though, between her experience as Vietnamese and those of the Chinese people she grew up with. Curiosity about her identity increased over the years, partly because questions she asked about Vietnam went unanswered by her parents and other relatives. “I lived with people who only spoke Chinese. My siblings and I went to Chinese school on the weekends,” she told Al Jazeera. “I also speak Vietnamese, and my name is a Vietnamese name. My experience is very much a Vietnamese experience in the sense that I came as a refugee and came during the wave of the Vietnamese refugee,” she said. But Vietnam was just not spoken about. And certainly not the war that ended 50 years ago when South Vietnam’s then-capital, Saigon, fell to North Vietnamese forces and their leaders in Hanoi. Trying to fill in the missing pieces of her family’s past, Ngo recounted how she signed up to attend a conference about the war in Vietnam at her college, “thinking that my father would be proud of me”. His response was stark and unexpected. “He said, ‘If you go to that conference, you are not my daughter!’” Ngo recounted. “And I was like, ‘Wow, I thought I was just learning about our history,’ to which he responds: ‘That is not our history.'” Ngo’s experience is not uncommon among Vietnamese families who fled their country as refugees after Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. The fall of Saigon ended the war and marked the reunification of North and South with Hanoi as the new capital of post-war Vietnam. But many of those who worked under the US-aligned government of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam as it was then known – its civil servants, soldiers, businesspeople – chose exile over unification and living in a communist Vietnam. Too many lives had been lost. Too much blood had been spilled – North and South – that many, like Ngo’s father, could never forgive nor live with their wartime foes in peacetime. For others, exile as refugees would be a choice taken to stay with relatives who feared persecution – or so they believed – if they stayed in Vietnam after the war. The US-backed wars in the three countries of Indochina left huge losses in their wake. Laos and Cambodia suffered an estimated 1.45 million deaths under US bombings. In Vietnam, there were an estimated 1.1 million military deaths on the communist North’s side alone and more than 254,000 on the side of the South Vietnamese republic. Compounded with civilian deaths, the estimated death toll from the war in Vietnam stands conservatively at 3.1 million people. For the victorious communist forces, they were left with a country in ruin. The northern part of the country was subjected to heavy US bombings. The railroads were inoperable. Most of the major roads were bombed into cratered tracks. Its economy was shattered. The northern population had also witnessed decades of conflict after the onset of French colonial rule in the late 19th century. Southern Vietnam’s urban infrastructure was less damaged by the war. The countryside was in ruins as rural areas had become the front lines in the guerrilla warfare that marked most of the fighting in the South. Croplands and forests had been poisoned by the US use of defoliant, better known as Agent Orange, the highly toxic chemical compound that was sprayed from the air to deny communist fighters on the ground the cover of trees and other concealing foliage. Millions of Vietnamese people were affected by the use of Agent Orange, including at least 150,000 children who would be born with severe physical, mental and developmental defects, and others are still being affected to this day because the soil remains poisoned. Unexploded bombs – in the many hundreds of thousands of tonnes – still “contaminate” up to 20 percent of Vietnam’s territory due to the millions of tonnes of ordnance used in the war, according to the Vietnam National Mine Action Center. While their April 30, 1975, victory marked an end to the war for the North Vietnamese, for the defeated US-backed government and people of the South, the war’s end was for many the start of lengthy separation from family in “reeducation camps” or permanent exile to Western countries, such as the US, Australia, Germany and Canada. Before the fall of Saigon, Ngo’s father was a high school principal in South Vietnam. After April 30, 1975, he was placed in reeducation camps twice before he made a desperate decision to take his family out of the country on a rickety, overcrowded boat in 1978. The family would spend half a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before being accepted by the US as refugees. By the time of their arrival in the US in the early 1980s, Ngo’s extended family had lost everything. Her immediate family, two aunts and uncles, and a grandmother and her relatives shared a two-storey, 30sq-metre (323sq-ft) subsidised housing unit in Los Angeles. Her father could not teach in the US and ended up becoming a deep ocean fisherman as well as doing odd jobs to put food on the table. The Vietnam they fled became a bad memory to be forgotten, Ngo said. “There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about. You don’t know about what’s happened in the past,” she told Al Jazeera. A profound sense of loss is a narrative shared by many Vietnamese refugee families – deep pain from the past that is felt across generations. Within some families, any mention of the war risks evoking strong emotions and triggering past griefs. The sensitivity is such that silence about the past is sometimes preferred. Cat Nguyen, a young American Vietnamese poet, experienced similar evasiveness when it came to family experiences of the war. Now based in Ho Chi Minh City – the name given to Saigon after the war in honour of the founding father of the Vietnamese Communist Party – Cat Nguyen said little was shared about their family’s past before coming to the US. “My family, in particular my grandma, harboured deep pain from her past,” Cat Nguyen told Al Jazeera. Cat Nguyen’s family also has a complicated political history. While a maternal grandfather was an active revolutionary who supported anticolonial efforts against the French in pre-independence Vietnam, a paternal grandfather served in the government of South Vietnam and a maternal grandmother was the principal of an American-English school in Saigon. But in 1975, Cat Nguyen’s family on both sides, and its political divide, left Vietnam. Cat Nguyen’s father was just 10 years old and mother was 13 when they left Vietnam. They were “uprooted from their native land in the blink of an eye” for a new life in the US, Cat Nguyen said. “The first few years in the US were filled with sadness for them: difficulties adjusting to a strange land, a language they were not fluent in, a people who did not understand the world they [the Vietnamese refugees] were coming from,” Cat Nguyen said. The trauma of fleeing Vietnam was also compounded by official accounts that cast the refugees and Vietnamese diaspora as abandoning their country in its hour of much-needed national reconstruction. This year’s 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon will be celebrated by the Communist Party of Vietnam as a day of unification and also “liberation of the south”. That message speaks to the aspirations of millions of Vietnamese in the north and south who made great sacrifices during the war, but the party’s official history is inevitably limited. To this day, the experiences of many in southern Vietnam and their perspectives on the war – what motivated them to resist North Vietnam’s political leadership, including Ho Chi Minh – remain absent from the celebratory narratives. In this fateful historical showdown, southerners who fled overseas as refugees are cast in the role of puppets or traitors, lured and manipulated by the enemy’s luxuries and propaganda into abandoning their own people. Seeing their experiences erased and delegitimised after the war added to the pain of displacement for Vietnam’s diaspora communities. It also explains the anger still harboured towards Vietnam’s leadership by an older generation of refugees, such as Ngo’s father. This is a multigenerational resentment that still rears its head when refugee parents believe their children are being exposed to positive narratives about bustling, economically thriving Vietnam five decades after the war – which they brand as “the North’s propaganda”. It is not only contemporary Vietnam’s official version of history that is problematic. Cat Nguyen realised there were also gaps when turning to American high school textbooks to learn about the war in Vietnam. In those schoolbooks, Washington’s decades-long military involvement in Vietnam, which left millions of people dead and millions scattered across the world as refugees, only “a small paragraph” was devoted to “how the US fought against communism in Vietnam”, Cat Nguyen said. Although supposedly sympathetic to their former South Vietnamese “allies”, Cat Nguyen told of a US-centric perspective that still subjects Vietnamese refugees to an “Americanised gaze”. “An Americanised gaze of refugees, meaning that Americans viewed all Vietnamese as either dangerous, threatening communists or as helpless, infantilised refugees,” Cat Nguyen said. Such narratives had helped to justify US intervention and military occupation of Vietnam to “save” the Vietnamese from themselves and communism. “While it is true that Vietnamese refugees suffered greatly, this gaze strips human beings of their own agency and humanhood, displacing them into a framework that upholds the system of white supremacy,” said Cat Nguyen, who has called Vietnam home for more than two years. Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen noted in his book Nothing Ever Dies that Vietnamese refugees were able to find in the US – in whatever limited space that was available to them – opportunities to tell their immigrant stories, to “insert themselves into the American dream”. But it was precisely that “dream” that Cat Nguyen would eventually grow disenchanted with along with its “capitalist propaganda”. The “American dream” has erased “the history of the US’s genocide of Indigenous populations, enslavement of Black and racialised peoples, and violent colonial and imperial projects”, they said. It is not that Cat Nguyen never had tried to fit into US society. Rather, from a young age, Cat Nguyen told of constantly being made to feel different in a society that “never sees them as American enough”. “Throughout my life, I watched as the Vietnamese parts of me slowly eroded. It wasn’t until the passing of my grandmother – the person who taught me the most about where I come from – that I began desperately searching for a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual return to my ancestral homeland and my humanity,” Cat Nguyen said. Seeking to reconnect, Cat Nguyen has become involved in art projects in the form of poetry, performance and filmmaking that experiment with a range of elements in Vietnamese folklore and traditional musical instruments to “unapologetically” recommit to “the fight against colonisation, imperialism and capitalism”. Drawn to identify with Vietnamese revolutionary fighters from “the other side”, Cat Nguyen spoke of finding a source of personal strength in their wisdom and dying for their cause. That conviction has not led to a dismissal of Cat Nguyen’s own family’s suffering as refugees in the US, but the acknowledgement of the coexistence of intergenerational trauma that Vietnam’s official history fails to include. One of Cat Nguyen’s poems pays homage to their late grandmother: “You crossed / an ocean / for me / to cross / another and then you crossed / a world / before I / could follow.” Ngo never did attend the university conference on the war in Vietnam that her father had threatened to disown her over all those years ago. That was out of respect for her father’s wishes. Since then, she has gradually come to see events in Vietnam during the war years and after from the North’s perspective – albeit with critical eyes. “I definitely see that when anything is too centralised and too authoritarian, you have corruption. But if the leadership is very strong and competent, things can move very efficiently,” said Ngo, who relocated to Vietnam more than 20 years ago. Like Cat Nguyen, Ngo understands the trauma her family members from the South suffered. It inspired her to pursue a career in psychology and public health focused on underserved communities. She became an associate professor of community health and social sciences at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. “One of the reasons why I work with marginalised populations and vulnerable populations is because I also understand that experience having grown up as a refugee and in the early years not having very much,” Ngo said. After more than two decades in Vietnam, Ngo has focused on equipping primary care clinics with the capacity to take care of poor people who suffer from mental health problems but lack access to care. “I feel like my experience as a refugee has really made me think a lot about the human condition and what kinds of social resources and economic resources we need to put in place to help people in transition and who are marginalised, to help people who are displaced in one way or another,” she said. For both Ngo and Cat Nguyen, being part of the Vietnamese diaspora and its painful past has given them a nuanced perspective on Vietnam’s history that is not readily found in the competing narratives of North and South. Kevin D Pham said there was a recurring story he was told while growing up in a Vietnamese refugee family in San Jose, California. “I was told by my high school teachers and especially my family that communists were bad, essentially,” said Pham, an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam. Pham’s paternal grandfather was imprisoned by communist Viet Minh forces in the 1950s, and his maternal grandfather was imprisoned in a reeducation camp after 1975 and died there from malnutrition. From a young age, Pham was taught to be proud of his Republic of Vietnam family heritage. Although he appreciates this perspective, he did not uncritically accept what he was taught. After graduating from university, he lived in Vietnam for eight months and, there, came to learn about and sympathise with perspectives from the “other side”. But growing up in the US, he told of listening to his uncle, who was a pilot, as he recounted the glory of his younger days when he fought “the communists” during the war. Pham’s father, on the other hand, was only 16 years old when he was forced to leave Vietnam and did not have much direct experience of warfare. Still, his patriotism for the vanquished US-backed Southern government was still unwavering. Pham recounts how, during his youth, older Vietnamese men would stop and salute as he and his father cruised down the streets of San Jose in his father’s bright yellow Ford Mustang, which had three horizontal red stripes painted on the bonnet to represent the flag of South Vietnam. In Vietnam to this day, the South Vietnamese flag is still taboo. Among staunch Vietnamese nationalists, the south’s “three-stripes”, or “ba que”, flag has become a popular slur, symbolising betrayal of the nation, defeat and humiliation. Any association with the former government’s flag, however remote, has also been used to denounce and alienate. In early 2023, Hanni Pham, an Australian-Vietnamese singer with the Korean band New Jeans, got caught up in the flag controversy and was subjected to an online campaign, which started when online activists spotted a South Vietnamese flag in a video recording made when she visited her grandparents’ home. The only public place where you can still find an actual three-stripe flag in Vietnam is in Hanoi at the newly built Vietnam Military History Museum, where one is displayed as a historical artefact. Yet attempts to reconcile Vietnam’s fractious past date back decades. In 1993, under Vietnam’s then-prime minister, Vo Van Kiet, the Communist Party’s Politburo issued a resolution that marked the first official attempt at reconciliation by encouraging the country to “respect differences, join hands in dismantling prejudices, shame, hatred, and look forward to the future”. Kiet was sensitive to the plight of Vietnamese refugees, something that he witnessed within his own family. In a well known interview in 2005 that drew both praise and criticism, he described April 30, 1975, as a “great victory” but one that left “millions happy, millions in sorrow”. “It is a scar that needs healing rather than left to bleed,” he said. In November, then-president and incumbent general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, To Lam, made a historic appearance at Columbia University in the US with Lien-Hang Nguyen, the daughter of a refugee family who became the first director of Vietnamese studies at the university and who has worked on building bridges between the diaspora and Vietnam. Their meeting reflected a broader spirit of unity and healing emerging among Vietnamese people long divided by the scars of war and political differences. Kevin D Pham said he noticed how those who have strong views on the historical North-South divide in Vietnam commonly use the word “puppets” as a slur, whether referring to supporters of the South Vietnamese government as “puppets” of the Americans or the North’s supporters as “puppets” of the Soviet Union and China. “There is this tendency on both sides of seeing the other side as puppets who cannot think for themselves,” Pham said, adding that it indicates a “lack of curiosity” about the other side’s perspective and has become “an obstacle to true reconciliation”. “What I encourage instead is the ability to understand multiple perspectives,” he said. For Cat Nguyen, what is fascinating is that the current national flag of Vietnam – a yellow, five-pointed star on a red background – which once brought painful memories to family members still in the US, is now a source of comradery throughout Vietnam. This was experienced firsthand when the Vietnamese national football team won the 2024 ASEAN championship in January. Cat Nguyen described flag-waving crowds storming onto streets across the country in celebration of a sporting, not a political, event. “I am empathetic to the suffering from both sides despite which flags they identify with, either the three-stripe or the red flag with yellow star,” Cat Nguyen said. “Everyone experienced so much violence, and ultimately I assign the most blame to US imperialism.” Additional reporting by Duy-Minh Nguyen in Ho Chi Minh City Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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A Constitutional Loophole: How Phone Inspections Test US Civil Rights

Border agents have the right to search electronic devices in the US. But experts say the practice raises constitutional concerns. Dearborn, Michigan – Travelling is a normal part of life for Michigan lawyer Amir Makled. As recently as December, he went overseas and returned home to the United States without any issues. “I’ve been out of the country at least 20 times. I’ve been all over Europe. I go to Lebanon every year,” he said. But returning this month to the Detroit Metro Airport was a very different experience. He and his family had just come home from a spring-break holiday in the Dominican Republic when they reached a customs checkpoint. “The agent looked over at me and then looked to another agent and asked him if the TTRT agents are here. I didn’t know what this meant.” He googled the acronym. It stands for Tactical Terrorist Response Teams. “As an Arab American and as a Muslim American, whenever I’m travelling, even if I’m driving in from Canada, I feel some sort of anxiety about it, that I’m going to be randomly selected to be stopped or profiled,” he explained. “When he said those words, I thought: ‘OK, I’m going to be profiled here.'” Sure enough, Makled and his family were asked to go to another room. Since Makled is a US citizen, born in Detroit, Michigan, he knew that he couldn’t be denied entry into the country. He urged his wife and kids to pass through the checkpoint without him. “I knew my rights at the border in that regard. And I was also familiar with the extent of border searches,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve ever been stopped.” But what happened next would put the lawyer in a precarious position. Border control agents have considerable legal rights to search a person’s belongings. The idea is to prevent security hazards, contraband or environmental threats from entering the country. Those searches, however, extend to the contents of electronic devices. And that raises questions about what material needs to be regulated — and what needs to be protected from the prying eyes of the government. Makled knew the border agents could take his phone. But as a lawyer, he faced a thorny ethical dilemma. His phone contained privileged attorney-client information. In the US, a basic tenet of the legal system is that a client can have frank discussions with their lawyer, with the safety of knowing anything they say will be kept confidential. A substantial amount of Makled’s work was on his phone. When asked to hand it over, he told the border officers he couldn’t give them the device. “All my emails, my text messages, my files, the cloud-based software I use for my office,” he said, “it’s all through my phone.” As a civil rights and criminal defence lawyer, Makled represents people he said are particularly vulnerable. One of his clients is a protester who was arrested at a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Michigan last year. She was later charged with resisting and obstructing police, a felony that carries up to a two-year prison sentence. Makled believes he was targeted because the border officers knew this information. One of the agents, he said, even called him a “famous lawyer”, a comment he took to be a reference to the protester’s case. In the end, he gave the agents written permission to see his contacts but no other permissions. After about 90 minutes at the airport, he was allowed to leave with his phone. For nearly a century, Title 19 of the US code has allowed border control officers the right to search any person entering the country, their luggage or other items in their possession at the time of the inspection. But digital devices today contain far more information than is relevant to a person’s trip. The most recent fiscal year saw 47,047 electronic devices searched by border control officers, the vast majority of which belonged to non-US citizens. That’s a nearly 13 percent increase over the previous fiscal year in 2023, when US Customs and Border Protection clocked 41,767 electronic searches. The question of whether these searches can be manipulated for political gain or reprisals has long dogged the process. In November 2018, for instance, an employee of the tech company Apple, Andreas Gal, said he was detained while returning to San Francisco from an international trip. Like Makled, Gal was flagged for the TTRT. And like the lawyer, customs officers pushed to search his electronic devices. He refused. Gal later said he believed he was targeted in response to the political views he expressed online. But in recent weeks, experts fear the threat of such searches has risen. Since taking office for a second term in January, President Donald Trump has sought to deport noncitizens he sees as critical of the US or its ally Israel. Material from electronic devices has been among the evidence allegedly used to expel people from the country. For example, kidney transplant specialist Rasha Alawieh had been denied re-entry after flying back to the US from her native Lebanon. She held a valid H-1B visa that allowed her to work in the US. News reports indicate that the Trump administration cited photos recovered from her phone as motivation for expelling her, including images she had of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a statement after Alawieh’s expulsion. Also in March, the French government said one of its citizens, a scientist, was prevented from entering the US on account of the political messages on his phone. The Trump administration has denied that accusation, however. “The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory — in violation of a non-disclosure agreement,” Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote on social media. “Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false.” There are two types of screenings a device may undergo while in border control custody. A “light” search happens when an officer looks through an electronic device by hand. An advanced search, which legally requires “reasonable suspicion” of a crime, involves the device being connected to external equipment. The device may not be returned to its owner for weeks or months. Border agents do not need a warrant to search an electronic device, although US citizens are not obligated to unlock their electronics in order to re-enter their country. However, for travellers who are not US citizens or permanent residents, refusing to share these details could result in being denied entry. But experts say these practices raise serious concerns about the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which grants protection from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Esha Bhandari, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, explained she has seen examples of the government using these border checks to bypass Fourth Amendment protections. “The government is increasingly treating this as a constitutional loophole,” Bhandari said. “They have someone under investigation, and rather than waiting on whether they can establish probable cause, which requires a judge to give a warrant, they wait until someone crosses the international border and treat that as a convenient opportunity to search their devices.” But just how far that loophole can stretch is a matter of debate. Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the courts in the US have yet to reach a consensus about just how far searches of digital devices can go — and what the limits are. “At this moment, whether you fly into San Francisco vs Boston vs Atlanta, there are three different rulings on exactly which part of your phone can be searched, for what purposes [or] what level of suspicion is needed,” Hussain said. “A number of lower courts have ruled on the issue, [but] there has not been uniformity.” For his part, Makled said he has not been deterred from travelling — or representing controversial causes. “I feel that this is an intimidation tactic. It’s an attempt to dissuade me from taking on these types of cases,” he said, referring to his defence of the protester arrested at the University of Michigan. “I say I won’t be dissuaded. I’m going to continue to do what I believe.” Follow Al Jazeera English:...