WHEN President Joe Biden arrives in Vietnam on Sunday (Sep 10), he is set to celebrate a new phase in the Washington-Hanoi relationship that would bring two historical foes closer than they have ever been, drawn together by China’s mounting ambitions.
During his state visit to Vietnam on Sunday, Biden is expected to oversee the signing of a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Hanoi, a symbolic but significant status long coveted by the US. Vietnam has until now reserved this status for only four countries: China, Russia, India and South Korea. For years, it had resisted granting this distinction to the US out of fear of offending China.
But as Beijing continues to encroach on waters claimed by Vietnam and as the US looks for more partners to counter China in the Indo-Pacific, the former enemies have found common ground. Some experts believe Hanoi may take the unprecedented move of raising Washington’s designation up two notches, from the bottom tier of Vietnam’s bilateral ties hierarchy to the highest.
“It is a very remarkable event because we all know that Vietnamese foreign policy is very cautious,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Whenever they try to upgrade any significant bilateral relations, they normally tend to do it step by step because of the fear that it may cause some concern, especially from Beijing.”
The agreement would send a message to China that Vietnam is now closer in the orbit of the US. But there are limits.
For decades, Vietnam has leveraged its ties with Russia and China to gain advantage, even while making clear that it would not choose sides in any conflict. Hanoi is unlikely to join in a coalition against China because of its “four nos” policy: no participating in military alliances, no siding with one country to act against another, no foreign military bases, and no using force in international relations.
Biden will be meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, over the objections of human rights activists who say that the US government’s professed commitment to promoting democracy and human rights abroad has been cast aside in favour of shoring up US dominance in the region. Vietnam continues to be one of the most authoritarian countries in South-east Asia, and Trong’s government has waged an especially harsh crackdown on dissent and activism in recent years.
Ben Swanton, co-director of the 88 Project, a US-based non-profit organisation that focuses on human rights issues in Vietnam, said that closer ties between the US and Vietnam had coincided with a significant increase in rights abuses by the Vietnamese state against its own citizens.
“It’s outrageous that President Biden has chosen to upgrade diplomatic ties with Vietnam at a time when the one-party state is in the middle of a brutal crackdown on activism, dissent and civil society,” Swanton said. “Despite lofty rhetoric about promoting a ‘rules-based international order’ and defending freedom, Biden is once again cozying up to autocrats with atrocious human rights records.”
The US-Vietnam relationship started off slow because of mistrust. For most of the 1990s, both countries were still preoccupied with dealing with the aftermath of the war, which ended in 1975.
“It’s ironic in a way that the way we started working together and building relationships and trust was by working on these issues,” said Scot Marciel, a fellow at Stanford University, who was the first US diplomat to work in Hanoi since the end of the war.
The Biden administration has urgently sought displays of solidarity against China, and Vietnam is one of the few South-east Asian nations that has publicly pushed back against China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea.
For these reasons, Vietnam represents “a critical swing state”, according to Kurt Campbell, Washington’s Indo-Pacific point person. “Even though we have different kinds of government, different overall values, I believe, fundamentally, the ability to work closely with Vietnam will be decisive for us going forward,” Campbell said in 2021.
Some leaders still publicly liken the relationship between Vietnam and China, which share a 1,287 km border, to that of “comrades and brothers”. But the two countries have a tense and painful history – including a millennium-long stretch in which China was Vietnam’s colonial overlord – that has left Vietnam deeply wary of its largest neighbour.
Surveys have shown that a majority of Vietnamese elites welcome the political and strategic influence of the US and are worried about China’s rise. Vietnam has “paid lip service” to Chinese programmes such as the Belt and Road Initiative but has resisted making any commitments to them, said Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
China is watching the deepening US-Vietnam relationship with concern. In April 2022, Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China called his counterpart in Vietnam, Bui Thanh Son, to stress that the US was trying to “create regional tension and incite antagonism and confrontation by pushing ahead with the ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’”.
“We can’t let the Cold War mentality resurge in the region and the tragedy of Ukraine be repeated around us,” Wang said.
Perhaps in a bid to dilute the significance of Sunday’s agreement, Vietnam has indicated in recent weeks that it also plans to upgrade ties with Japan, Australia, Indonesia and Singapore.
Analysts say Vietnam is likely to present its deepening alignment with the S to China in economic terms. The US is now the biggest export market and the second-biggest trading partner for Vietnam. In 2022, US-Vietnam trade reached US$124 billion, still lower than China-Vietnam trade at US$176 billion.
There are other signs that Vietnam is seeking to soften the impact on China of a closer bond with the US.
In recent months, Trong has met multiple senior Chinese officials, ostensibly to notify them about the upgrade in ties with the US. On Wednesday, the Chinese Communist Party’s international department head Liu Jianchao met Trong and “both sides agreed to consolidate political mutual trust”. NYTIMES
Source : TheBusinessTimes