There is something indescribably odd about a summit between the leaders of North Korea and the United States in Vietnam

Who won the Vietnam War?  Can of Saigon Gold Limited Edition Premium Lager brewed by Vietnam's largest brewery, owned by Thai ThaiBev.  This is from their Vietnamese language website, using English language, and some sort of stylized Oriental dragon.  At some point you have to suspect that the NVA really cashed in their chips at the American party favor table.  Maybe Donald Trump, who never had  the chance to try this breweries 1960s big item, "33 Beer", but if he wants to, it's still offered as "333 Beer".

Indeed, a lot of it is weird.

First of all, there's the odd budding friendship between the U.S. and Vietnam, and by Vietnam, we partially mean the government of Vietnam which we had hoped to keep coming to power in the first place and which we fought against for well over a decade.

And then we only got involved in Vietnam in the first place when the North Korean invasion of South Korea suddenly sparked out interests in trying to make sure that the French didn't go down the tubes in Indochina.

And the meeting is in Hanoi, which has been the seat of the Communist government of Vietnam since the French departed, but which now has a Victoria's Secret, which suggests that while we may have lost the war, we're winning the peace there.

Heck, Coca Cola Vietnam was recently voted one of the two most sustainable, i.e,. green, companies in Vietnam.  Coca Cola Vietnam?

Well, heck, what can we say about that.  The Communist government privatized its largest beer producer which was bought by ThaiBev.  It's big brand, among several, is Saigon Beer.  Not Ho Chi Minh City beer.

Anyhow, North Vietnam received more aid from Communist China than it did from the Soviet Union during the war, and up to 100,000 Chinese troops were in the north during the war, but immediately after the war the two Communist countries had a falling out and they've reverted to their default not liking each other at all, even though both are evolving away from real Communism into some sort of weird corporate capitalism pretty quickly.

And then there's Donald Trump, who had a deferment during the war after having attended a military prep school, now ending up in Vietnam, to meet Kim Jong-un, the Communist monarch of North Korea, who has never been in anyone's military but who attended private school in Switzerland, which is about as non Communist as you can get.

Kim Jong-un has gotten over his exposure to the West, apparently, even though in Stalinist Russia that would have resulted in a prison sentence, only to become the dictator of an inherited Stalinist theme park.  This is so much the case that he's going to the summit, or rather to the Vietnamese border, on an armored train.  Armored trains are something that haven't been real military technology since at least World War Two and are really something out of the Russian Civil War. They're absurd, but everything about North Korea is absurd.