History of the United States (1964–1980)
The growing Watergate scandal was a major disaster for Nixon, eroding his political support in public opinion and in Washington. However he did manage to secure large-scale funding for South Vietnam, much of which was wasted. The United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam before the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. However, Watergate resulted in significant Democrat gains in the 1974 midterm elections and when the new 94th Congress convened the following January, it immediately voted to terminate all aid to South Vietnam in addition to passing a bill forbidding all further US military intervention in Southeast Asia. President Ford was against this, but as Congress had a veto-proof majority, he was forced to accept. South Vietnam rapidly collapsed as the North invaded it in force, and Saigon fell to the NVA on April 30, 1975. Later nearly one million Vietnamese managed to flee to the U.S. as refugees. The impact on the U.S. was muted, with few political recriminations, but it did leave a "Vietnam Syndrome" that cautioned against further military interventions anywhere else. Nixon (and his next two successors Ford and Carter) had dropped the containment policy and were not willing to intervene anywhere.
United States–Vietnam trade relations
After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the U.S. and Vietnam maintained no economic relation in more than two decades. Washington extended President Richard Nixon’s 1964 trade embargo to all of Vietnam and all bilateral trade activities were prohibited. The Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations’ joint efforts to resolve the remains of U.S. servicemen missing in action (MIA) had set the foundation for the normalization of bilateral trade relations between the two nations during the Clinton Administration. On February 3, 1994, President Bill Clinton ordered the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo on Vietnam. Three years later, in 1997, Pete Peterson was appointed as the first U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam since 1975. The two governments signed the first bilateral trade agreement (BTA) on July 13, 2000.