Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama lifted the arms embargo on communist Vietnam on Monday.



CNN reported:

President Barack Obama announced Monday that the United States is fully lifting a decades-long ban on the sale of military equipment to Vietnam.

In a joint news conference in Hanoi with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, Obama said that the removal of the ban on lethal weapons was part of a deeper defense cooperation with the country and dismissed suggestions it was aimed at countering China’s growing strength in the region.

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Instead, it was the desire to continue normalizing relations between the United States and Vietnam and to do away with a ban “based on ideological division between our two countries,” he said.

The Vietnam War ended in April 1975 with the fall of Saigon — now called Ho Chi Minh City — after the United States withdrew combat forces and the North Vietnamese launched a massive offensive to reunite their homeland under communism.