“[Vietnam] supports Japan playing a more important and active role in the Indo-Pacific and Asia-Pacific,” Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong said during a historic speech before Japan’s parliament in late November. After a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the two countries upgraded their ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership, vowing to enhance cooperation in all key dimensions, including maritime security and national defence.
Days earlier, Thuong was also on a charm offensive in the United States. During a widely covered speech at the Council on Foreign Relations on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, he praised the speed and breadth of transformation in Vietnam-US relations. It goes without saying that China was at the centre of discussions between the Vietnamese leader and his US and Japanese counterparts.
The once-impoverished and war-stricken nation has quickly transformed into the new darling of the West, which sees Vietnam as a potential geopolitical and economic counterbalance to China. On closer examination, however, it’s clear Vietnam is far from interested in joining any anti-China alliance.
If anything, it has gradually recognised the centrality of stable ties with Beijing to fulfil its national goals, including becoming a high-income nation by the middle of the century. This could explain the uptick in high-level Vietnam-China exchanges in the past year alone, which will culminate in a visit by President Xi Jinping to Hanoi this coming week.
Mainstream discussions of Vietnam’s foreign policy are replete with clichés. There is the narrative of Vietnam’s thousands of years of dealing with China, even if the nation as we know it today is a more recent political construct. The country’s bitter maritime disputes with Beijing in the South China Sea are often seen as a continuation of this seemingly eternal conflict.
The reality, however, is more nuanced. As scholars such as Cornell University’s Keith Weller Taylor have argued, Sino-Vietnamese relations were often marked by long periods of peaceful coexistence, with Vietnamese autonomy “dependent upon a successful practice of mimicry” of China.
If anything, Maoist China served as a major patron as well as an ideological blueprint for Vietnam’s communist leadership. Even more fascinating is how Vietnam’s post-Cold-War Doi Moi strategy was inspired by China’s market reforms under Deng Xiaoping.
Moreover, there is the cliché of Vietnam’s supposed strategic opportunism, namely its penchant for playing multiple powers against each other. Similar to many of its neighbours, contemporary Vietnam is committed to a policy of non-alignment and refusing to side with one superpower against the other. This was born out of the country’s traumatic experience during the Cold War, when it was caught between the Soviet Union, the US and China.
But Vietnam’s foreign policy is far from static and monolithic. In the past decade alone, its balancing strategy has undergone a remarkable transformation, thanks to historic changes at home and in the broader international system.
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Joe Biden says US and Vietnam ‘deepening cooperation’
Joe Biden says US and Vietnam ‘deepening cooperation’
In the early 2010s, Hanoi’s more reform-minded leadership, buoyed by deepening economic ties to the West, welcomed strategic cooperation with the US to expand Vietnam’s export markets as well as enhance its deterrence capabilities against a rising China. Vietnam has also flirted with a potential security partnership with the Philippines, a US treaty ally, to jointly constrain China’s ambitions in the South China Sea.
Pursuing a strategic partnership with the West was part of a broader diversification strategy, given Hanoi’s historical dependence on Russia, now a declining power. This West-looking strategy reached its peak during the Trump administration in the US, which actively courted Hanoi to hem in China.
In recent years, however, Vietnam’s foreign policy has taken a more China-friendly turn for three reasons. First, on the domestic front, more liberal and West-friendly elements have been purged under the guise of anti-corruption initiatives.
Second, Vietnam’s communist leadership prefers a more multipolar international order and has resisted key tenets of Western foreign policy in recent years. Vietnam has not only refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reports suggest it is also circumventing Western sanctions by negotiating a new major defence deal with Moscow.
Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong (left) shakes hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on October 17. Photo: Reuters
More recently, Vietnam drew on its own anti-colonial struggle as it took up the Palestinian cause, refusing to condemn Hamas’ October 7 attack while advocating for an immediate ceasefire amid the rising civilian death toll in Gaza. In effect, Vietnam has mirrored China’s positioning on the latest global conflicts.
The third, and arguably most important, factor in Vietnam’s more Beijing-friendly turn is the physics of trade and investment. Vietnam relies heavily on imports of raw materials and intermediate goods from China amid a boom in its manufacturing capacity.
A significant part of Vietnamese exports to the West draws from both Chinese capital and technology. In many ways, Vietnam has been absorbed into China’s gigantic Pearl River Delta production hub.
Workers put together components on an assembly line at a Vingroup’s Vsmart phone factory, in Hai Phong, Vietnam. Photo: Reuters
Vietnam is also deeply invested in a stable US-China relationship. A fully fledged economic war between the two nations could, according to one study, lead to a reduction of up to 4.7 per cent in the gross domestic product of regional states. An actual war would be even more devastating for countries such as Vietnam.
As Vietnam’s president recently put it, his country’s motto now is “to [shelve] the past, overcome differences, optimise similarities and look toward the future”.
Notwithstanding its contentious history and ongoing maritime disputes with China, Vietnam’s future is ultimately dependent on maintaining stable ties with its communist neighbour to the north. Xi’s upcoming visit to Hanoi is expected to cement a new golden era of bilateral relations.
Richard Heydarian is a Manila-based academic and author of Asia’s New Battlefield: US, China and the Struggle for Western Pacific, and the forthcoming Duterte’s Rise
