At the heart of both “Red Flags” and “Play the Red Queen” is Juris’s desire to expose the corrupting effect of American aid, both military and civilian, on Viet Nam. “You’re in there spending billions building tremendous airfields, tremendous camps, bringing in economic aid in the millions and millions, basically taking over the country, crushing their economy with the influx of your — the French called them ‘gangrene dollars’ – you just wipe out their economy so they’re totally dependent on you. Once we were in on that scale, the game was over. So this enormous cornucopia comes landing in Viet Nam, and the Vietnamese elites scramble to control it and grab it and use it and extort it. President Thieu left Viet Nam with something like 35,000 pounds of luggage. What do you think that was? Furniture?”