President Joe Biden goes yesterday to a Vietnam that’s looking to dramatically ramp up trade with the United States — a sign of how competition with China is reshaping relationships across Asia.
The president has made it a point of pride that Vietnam is elevating the United States to the status of being a comprehensive strategic partner. Other countries that Vietnam has extended this designation to include China and Russia. Giving the U.S. the same status suggests that Vietnam wants to hedge its friendships as U.S. and European companies look for alternatives to Chinese factories.
Biden, who arrived in Hanoi yesterday afternoon, said last month at a fundraiser in Salt Lake City that Vietnam doesn’t want a defense alliance with the U.S., “but they want relationships because they want China to know that they’re not alone” and can choose its own partners. The president decided to tack a visit to Vietnam on to his trip to India for the Group of 20 summit that wrapped up Sunday.
With China’s economic slowdown and President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of political power, Biden sees an opportunity to bring more nations — including Vietnam and Cambodia — into America’s orbit.
“We find ourselves in a situation where all of these changes around the world are taking place,” Biden explained last month about Vietnam. “We have an opportunity, if we’re smart, to change the dynamic.”
Jon Finer, Biden’s chief deputy national security adviser, said the elevated status represents Vietnam’s highest tier of international partnership.
“It’s important to make clear that this is more than words,” Finer told reporters Sunday aboard Biden’s flight to Hanoi. “In a system like Vietnam, it’s a signal to their entire government, their entire bureaucracy about the depth and cooperation and alignment with another country that is possible.”
Finer noted a five-decade arc in U.S.-Vietnam relations, from conflict during the Vietnam War to normalization and Vietnam’s status as a top trading partner that also shares Washington’s concerns over security in the South China Sea.
“We will be deepening that relationship through this visit,” he added.
Finer also addressed reports that Vietnam was pursuing a deal to buy weapons from Russia, even as it sought deeper ties to the United States. Finer acknowledged Vietnam’s lengthy military relationship with Russia and said the U.S. continues to work with Vietnam and other countries with similar ties to Russia to try to limit their interactions with a nation the U.S. accuses of committing war crimes and violating international law with its aggression in Ukraine.
U.S. trade with Vietnam has already accelerated since 2019.
But there are limits to how much further it can progress without improvements to the country’s infrastructure, its workers’ skills and its governance. Nor has increased trade automatically put the Vietnamese economy on an upward trajectory.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that the CEOs she talks with rank Vietnam highly as a place to diversify supply chains that before the pandemic had been overly dependent on China. Raimondo has been trying to broaden those supply chains through the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an initiative Biden launched last year.
“Whether it’s Vietnam or Malaysia, Indonesia, India, companies are really taking a hard look at those countries as places to do more business,” Raimondo said. “It is also true that they need to improve their workforce, housing, infrastructure and, I’d say, transparency in government operations.”
Vietnam’s economic growth slipped during the first three months of 2023. Its exporters faced higher costs and weaker demand as high inflation worldwide has hurt the market for consumer goods. MDT/AP
