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Monday, June 29, 2015

From Foe to Frenemy
Why the United States is Courting Vietnam
David Brown

DAVID BROWN is a regular contributor to the Asian Sentinel.

For several years now, the United States and Vietnam have been moving closer to a strategic
entente grounded in mutual apprehension of China’s ambitions. Many in Beijing claim that
the United States seeks to turn Vietnam against China. But that view has got the causal
arrow backward: It is precisely China’s quest for hegemony over the South China Sea that
keeps encouraging the United States and Vietnam to restore their patchy relations.

One sign that the United States and Vietnam are serious about strengthening their ties is
President Barack Obama’s agreement to meet General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, the
head of Vietnam’s Communist Party, in Washington in early July. It’s a very rare thing for a
mere party leader to have face time in the Oval Office, but there are several reasons why
Trong merits Obama’s attention. Most importantly, the general secretary, who had personally
asked for this meeting, has long harbored doubts about U.S. intentions toward Hanoi. And
this apprehension, also reflected among his factional allies within the Communist Party, is
the last obstacle to a quasi-alliance between Vietnam and its foe of 40-odd years ago.

Those doubts are rooted in Trong’s ideological leanings as an expert in Marxism–Leninism,

which disposes him to be wary of democratic nations and their motives and has led him to
suspect Washington of having bad intentions toward the Hanoi regime. Over the years,
Trong and his allies have promoted an image of the United States as evil and inattentive to
Hanoi’s needs. Even though—given the factional cleavage behind the Vietnamese party’s
facade of unity—it’s the progressives (relatively speaking) aligned with Prime Minister
Nguyen Tan Dung who seem to have the better answers to Vietnam’s problems, Trong and
other conservatives still command the ruling party’s institutions. They can therefore frustrate
reform initiatives that they don’t like. They are also the custodians of the negative narrative
against the United States.

Forty years after the fall of Saigon, that narrative still governs party doctrine. Officers of
Vietnam’s internal security agencies can hardly string together a paragraph about the United
States that doesn’t include references to “foiling the plots of the enemy” against the people’s
socialist government. Party media frequently warn against the “peaceful change scenario,”
the notion that Vietnamese civil society organizations (particularly those supported by
Washington) are subversive and will trigger upheavals like the ones that overturned
communism in Eastern Europe.

In this regard, Trong and his allies are out of step [1] with their countrymen and even many
party members. Vietnam’s citizens would rather see their nation aligned with the United
States than with China. In the six years since Beijing began nibbling its way toward
hegemony over the South China Sea—the same expanse that Vietnamese doggedly refer to
as “our East Sea”—many of the party’s three million-plus members have also concluded that
China is again, as often was the case throughout Vietnam’s relations with its northern

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neighbor, an existential threat.

To Trong and his allies, avoiding entanglement with China’s rivals while engaging Chinese
counterparts at all levels of the government and ruling party structures has been the best
way to placate Beijing. Their view is that U.S. interest in East Asia waxes and wanes
depending on what else is preoccupying Washington, but “China is always there,” an
uncomfortably large presence on Vietnam’s border.

That strategy has become an increasingly tough sell since Beijing laid claim to well over a
million square miles of open sea, waters stretching south from the China coast almost to
Singapore. Every dry season since 2009, China has backed its claim by flexing its military
and paramilitary muscle in the South China Sea. When the annual monsoons come,
however, China has shifted to talk mode.

Though Vietnamese party leaders regularly travel to Beijing, hoping to repair the “special
bond” and “forge deeper understanding,” China’s behavior in recent years has caused even
Trong and his ideological allies to lose heart. Reportedly, they were stunned by China’s
deployment last year of a deep sea oil rig into waters that are properly Vietnam’s by any
reasonable reading of the UN Convention on Law of the Sea. Not long afterward, Trong
quietly let it be known that he wished to visit Washington.

Another party conservative, Minister of Public Security Tran Dai Quang, was in Washington in
March, reportedly to prepare for Trong’s pending visit and polish his own foreign policy
credentials ahead of the Party Congress in January 2016.

Then, in early June, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and his Vietnamese counterpart
signed an agreement in Hanoi that will make it easier for Vietnam to navigate U.S.
regulations on the procurement of military hardware. Given that it followed closely after the
annual Shangri La conclave of Asian security chiefs, Carter’s brief visit signaled that U.S.
and Vietnamese interests in the South China Sea are aligned.

In particular, Vietnam wants China to stop challenging its sovereignty over oilfields and tiny
islands off its coasts. The United States, Carter had insisted a day earlier in Singapore,
wants “rising China [2]” to play by the rules. Neither might nor past injuries, he explained,
gave Beijing rights (to impede innocent passage, for example) to lands that it had never
possessed in its imperial past; nor was it in any state’s interest to dismiss the dispute
resolution framework created by international law.

China has certainly noticed these visits. When it learned of Trong’s pending trip to
Washington, Beijing sent an almost immediate counter invitation to Trong, which he
accepted. So, for four days in early April, Beijing rolled out the red carpet for Trong and his
entourage. In the official accounts of their meetings, however, there was no hint that the talks
produced any substantive results. There was simply a reiteration of the now-tired formula:
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Trong promised “joint efforts to control maritime disputes and
safeguard peace and stability.”

Trong’s upcoming visit to Washington may prove more substantive. With a possibly
momentous Party Congress next year, Vietnamese politics are in flux. So for Washington, it’s
a good time to have a cordial dialogue with Trong. By addressing Vietnam’s real concerns,
Obama may persuade Trong (and by extension, his factional allies) to believe that the
Americans can be reliable partners with compatible interests. Making nice with the Hanoi
regime’s conservative faction could cement a path to the U.S.–Vietnam entente that has so
far proven elusive.

Copyright © 2015 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

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Links
[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2014/07/2014-07-14-Balance-of-Power-Topline.pdf
[2] http://www.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1945

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