This doesn’t read like ignorance to me. Like a lawyer prompting a witness, this seems like someone asking the questions that allow the interviewee to give the most effective replies.

I can’t read the “reply was devastating” line as being personally devastating to an ignorant journalist, because someone in that position didn’t need to write that and put it on show. Instead I read it as being devastating to the naive sentiment, perhaps held by the reader, that Vietnam’s only legitimate response was to run to the UN.

Thanks, I got this impression reading it too but I wasn’t going to investigate myself so straight to the comments in hopes that someone has already validated my intuition.