President is visiting Hanoi after attending a gathering of G-20 leaders in India
President Biden and Vietnamese leader Nguyen Phu Trong at a welcoming ceremony in Hanoi on Sunday.
HANOI—The U.S. entered a new and strengthened diplomatic partnership with Vietnam, a country where it fought for years to prevent a Communist takeover, as Washington seeks to counterbalance China in the region.
President Biden arrived in Vietnam on Sunday to elevate the relationship between the two countries to Vietnam’s highest designation for foreign partners—a comprehensive strategic partnership—from its lowest. While it isn’t a defense alliance, it formally puts Washington at the same level as Russia and China in the eyes of the Vietnam government.
While the new status is symbolic, it is aimed at giving American companies, including defense contractors, reassurance that the recent warming relations between the U.S. and Vietnam will endure, and promote Vietnam as a dependable location for U.S. manufacturing operations abroad. It also sends a message to China and Russia, two longstanding partners of Vietnam, about the growing strength of U.S. ties.
The U.S. pledged a series of initiatives as part of the announcement, including a new partnership to expand Vietnam’s semiconductor production base in support of U.S. industry, as well as other investments in trade. High-level meetings between U.S. officials and their Vietnamese counterparts are expected to become more common.
“This trip has been a historic moment,” Biden said following talks with Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party. “Today we can trace a 50-year arc of progress in the relationship between our nations from conflict to normalization, to some new elevated status that will be a force for prosperity and security.”
The Vietnamese leader said that the U.S.-Vietnam partnership has grown by “leaps and bounds” and was now “elevated to a new height.”
Both countries are seeking a counterbalance to what they see as a threat posed by China. On Sunday, Biden reiterated that the U.S. was seeking stability in its relationship with China. “I don’t want to contain China. I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up,” Biden said.
The elevation of the U.S. relationship with Vietnam comes nearly 30 years after the countries established diplomatic ties. After the Communist victory in the Vietnam War in 1975, Washington placed a trade embargo on Vietnam that was maintained until the 1990s.
More recently, annual trade between the U.S. and Vietnam has exploded—more than doubling in the last five years—as western companies shift manufacturing from China. American companies such as Apple and Nike have expanded their production bases in Vietnam in recent years, and Intel has boosted investment in its Ho Chi Minh City plant.
“In a system like Vietnam’s, it’s a signal to their entire government, to their entire bureaucracy about the depth of cooperation and alignment with another country,” said Jon Finer, principal deputy national security adviser.
The announcement shows how the relationship between the two countries continues to warm, said Erin Murphy, senior fellow for the Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
Vietnam is “one of the few countries in the region that has the same qualms about China on the national security side, but also, economically, they are one of the few places where you can scale up on manufacturing,” she said, noting Vietnam’s growth in vaccines and electronics.
Ted Osius, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said the partnership reflects a remarkable acceleration of trust given how cautious Vietnamese leaders have been about irritating Beijing.
“They decided to put aside their hesitation,” said Osius, now chief executive of the US-ASEAN Business Council, a trade group that advocates for U.S. businesses in Southeast Asia.
While the partnership doesn’t come with concrete gains for U.S. businesses, such as lower tariffs, Osius said it signals to executives that Vietnam is able to participate in sophisticated supply chains and should be considered by companies looking for factory locations outside China.
The Biden administration is seeking to deter Chinese aggression in the region by building closer links with friendly Asian countries. In recent months, it has made diplomatic strides in nations that have sometimes been skeptical of U.S. intentions, expanding the U.S. military’s access to bases in the Philippines, agreeing to jointly produce jet engines in India and now boosting ties with Vietnam.
President Biden’s visit to Vietnam marks an era of increasing diplomatic engagement between the two countries.
Still, Vietnam maintains close relations with China and is unlikely to join any anti-China coalition. China is the main source of raw materials that Vietnamese factories use to churn out clothing, shoes and television sets for export to the West. The two Communist nations are both wary of rhetoric promoting Western-style human rights and democracy.
As the two leaders spoke, Trong talked about the importance of “noninterference in domestic affairs.” At one point Biden said: “I also raised human rights as a priority for both my administration and the American people.”
In a sign of their close bonds, Trong was the first world leader to visit Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing after he secured a third term last October. At the time, the two countries pledged to “promote the unceasing development of socialism.”
Vietnam also maintains close ties with Russia, which supplies most of its imported weapons. Moscow has long filled a void, as Western countries have been leery of selling arms to Hanoi until recently. Vietnam has sought to avoid going to China for weapons. The two countries fought a deadly border war in 1979.
Since Russia’s conquest of Crimea in 2014, Vietnam has diversified its arms imports somewhat—buying from countries such as Israel, Belarus and South Korea, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. After the U.S. lifted a ban on lethal-weapons sales to Vietnam in 2016, the country has—for the first time in decades—purchased some U.S. equipment, including drones and electronics.
Last December, Vietnam held an arms expo that it said was designed to diversify where it sourced weapons, which a delegation of American companies attended. Still, analysts say that any push away from Russian arms is likely to be slow, and Vietnam continues to seek hardware that is compatible with Russian systems.
Ahead of Biden’s visit, a New York Times report detailed recent Vietnamese efforts to continue purchasing Russian weapons. Asked about that report, Finer said the U.S. had a “strong sense that there is an increasing discomfort on the part of the Vietnamese with that relationship.”
Trong, like China’s Xi, is in his third term as leader and has sidelined rivals with a far-reaching anticorruption campaign. Some had expected Trong to steer his country away from closer ties to the West because a share of those pushed from power under his rule had been interlocutors with Washington. Instead, Vietnam has continued to strengthen relations with the U.S.
“It’s not communism or socialism that is driving Vietnam’s foreign policy; it’s national interest and pragmatism,” said Le Hong Hiep, senior fellow at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, a think tank in Singapore.
Vietnam’s outreach to the U.S. is part of a strategy to deepen its ties with many foreign nations, said Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and an expert on Vietnam. Economic growth in China is slowing. Russia, a longtime supporter, has been weakened and isolated by its invasion of Ukraine. Last year, Vietnam upgraded its relations with South Korea, and Hanoi is deepening ties with Australia, Japan and Singapore, as well. “This is part of a new game by Vietnam,” Thayer said.
High-level discussions between U.S. and Vietnamese officials in recent months laid the groundwork for the upgrade in ties.
In August, Biden told supporters at a fundraiser that he would be traveling to Vietnam soon “because Vietnam wants to change our relationship and become a partner.”
Biden’s trip to Hanoi follows a visit to India for a meeting of the Group of 20 nations. He is expected to meet with other Vietnamese leaders and visit a memorial for the late Sen. John McCain, who spent 5 ½ years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Biden and McCain were friends and colleagues in the Senate, and Biden delivered a eulogy at McCain’s funeral in 2018. “I miss him,” Biden said on Sunday.