Josh Levine

NYC area

Out of curiosity, I co-founded a magazine about Vietnam, from New York, while we were still technically at war with the country, in 1994. This was just after the national currency was literally based on rice. Among other things, I wanted to watch the country's transition toward Capitalism. The country grew on me quickly and I continue to root for it and believe in the people there, all the more for having gotten to know them over several years in Hanoi.

I showed up looking to debate Communists. One day several years later, interviewing a top land official about the ridiculous irony that land was the country's only free market -- yet was technically owned "by the people" -- came my moment of deep insight. After literally a three hour interview with this top Communist official who, like most top officials served in the "American War," he admitted, "we are just army men. We are just trying to hold the country together until our smart children can figure this mess out." This was twenty five years after the fighting stopped and around ten years ago, now. Their kids are just starting to take over -- I'm sure the army monopolies continue to be tempting, especially to their kids, some of whom are Harvard MBAs! Anyway, in this case, it's been over half a century since Vietnam broke the millennium- long grip foreigners held on its sovereignty. Ironically, its path to prosperity is based on foreign investors, who are attracted to its the very sovereignty it fought so hard to win -- Vietnam's strongest card is that it is NOT China.

The only lesson I see for Egypt is to try and imagine the scenarios under which the Army will give up the industries it runs. Vietnam had Jeffrey Sachs repeating his USSR lecture series on trusting the Free Market but Egypt won't even have this. Breaking monopolies could be harder than breaking the grip of a single old king -- especially when Capitalism and Democracy are not squeezed into the same box.