Episode Notes:

Last week, after the G20 summit in New Delhi, the United States and Vietnam agreed to elevate their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership amidst competition with China. For its part, Beijing said the agreement reflected a “cold war mentality.”  Gregory Poling, the director of the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies joined the WarCast to discuss the agreement and what it could mean for security in the Indo-Pacific.

[:51] Why did this elevation happen now?

[2:21] How does Vietnam balance China, Russia and the United States?

[3:34] How does Vietnam view the global order?

[4:56] What will this mean, practically?

[6:28] History of U.S.-Vietnamese relations

[8:22] How has the international community, China in particular, responded?

[9:50] Will there be a real Chinese response?

Episode Transcript

Erin O’Brien: My name is Erin O'Brien and I'm the membership editor at War On the Rocks. You are listening to the WarCast, the members-only podcast for what you need to know now.

Last week after the G20 Summit in New Delhi, the United States and Vietnam agreed to elevate their relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership amidst competition with China. Beijing, for its part, said the agreement reflected a "Cold War" mentality. Here to tell us more about the agreement and what it could mean for security in the Indo-Pacific is Greg Poling, the director of the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome to the War Cast.

Greg Poling: Thanks for having me back, Erin.

Erin O’Brien: So why don't you start off by telling us a little bit more about this partnership, about this agreement, and kind of why it's happening right now?

Greg Poling: So this matters, in a sense, more to Vietnam than it does to the US because Vietnam maintains a rigid Leninist hierarchy of its formal diplomatic relations. So if you're a partner, you're one of three tiers of partner. And the US has, since the Obama administration, been languishing down at the bottom tier, comprehensive partner. Now, we are tier 1, comprehensive strategic partner, skipping all the way over the middle tier, a strategic partner, and that puts the US on the exact same level as China and Russia along with India and South Korea. That is a signal from Vietnam, both to the world and to its own system, its own government and the communist party system, that at the highest levels, the leadership is saying the Americans matter as much as China. And if you're within the Vietnamese government system or the party system, you are free to pursue whatever you want. Economic, diplomatic, securitized with the Americans without fear of reprisal or anything like that.

And why now? Well, because of China, like so much in the world. Because China won't stop misbehaving and treating Vietnam badly particularly in the South China Sea. Vietnam has become convinced that to maintain its own strategic autonomy, it needs a closer relationship with the Americans to balance its giant revisionist neighbor to the north.

Erin O’Brien: Correct me if I'm wrong, but having China, Russia, and the United States at this present political moment all on the same tier as allies strikes me as somewhat of a contradiction. How is Vietnam maintaining this balance?

Greg Poling: I would suggest it's more of an evolution. Now, if we had all three been elevated this year, I would say, "Yeah, that doesn't make any sense." But that's not what happened. The Russians and the Chinese were put at this tier two decades ago, decades effectively in the aughts at a time when China was still on the charm offensive, and I would suggest that pretty significant portion of the Vietnamese system still distrusted the Americans, believed that our ultimate aim was the peaceful evolution of Vietnam's communist party system. Russia and China have now sat there unmoving for the last 15 to 20 years, depending which one you mean, while Vietnam is focused on elevating relations with the US, with other European partners, with other members of the association of Southeast Asian nations and with the Indians, Koreans, and Japanese. That's a reflection of the shifting way in which Vietnam believes that the international system functions and that its own independence and autonomy is best secured.

Erin O’Brien: And how do they believe the system functions?

Greg Poling: They believe that the best way for a small or medium-sized power like Vietnam to maintain its own strategic interests is to not be entrapped in any camp, right? So Vietnam has famously, at least since late '90s, what's called the Three Nos policy. This is the way it frames it's strategic equivalent of its national defense white papers. No foreign basing permitted in Vietnam, no permanent alliances, no siding with one country to target another. And then in their last white paper, they added a force, no use or threat of the use of force. That is because Vietnam has spent, well, 2,000 years, sharing a border with China, constantly trying not to be sucked into the Chinese orbit. It had to throw off the French yoke at the end of World War II. It is the only country that has fought and won wars against three members of the UN Security Council in the last century, the French, the Americans, and in 1979, the Chinese.

So Vietnam is not interested in being part of anybody's club. As far as Vietnam's concerned, the clubs don't serve the interest in small and medium powers. What Vietnam wants is to maintain whatever practical cooperation it needs to with the big players to maintain its own autonomy, and that's what this is.

Erin O’Brien: Got it. So in practical terms, what could this upgrading in relations mean for Vietnam and for the United States?

Greg Poling: I think it'll accelerate a lot of the trends that are already underway, so on the economic front, and a lot of the joint statement related to this when President Biden was not only focused on the economic front. Vietnam is already the top destination for not just American, but most foreign firms looking to diversify their supply chains out of China. That'll accelerate. A lot of the focus during the announcement was on US support for Vietnam moving up the semiconductor, manufacturing, testing, packaging, supply chain. A lot of focus on critical minerals. Vietnam has the second-largest reserve of critical minerals after China. Vietnam also needs a lot of help when it comes to the energy transition.

So there's a lot there that's already happening that this comprehensive strategic partnership will speed up. We will also see an acceleration of security cooperation even though that was purposely underplayed in the joint statement. We now have usually one carrier visit a year to Vietnam. The US has transferred three Hamilton-class cutters. Last year Vietnam held its first ever International Defense Expo. The biggest booths were Lockheed and Raytheon. And all of that in context of the fact that it was illegal for the United States to sell arms to Vietnam until 2016. So don't think of this in absolute terms. Don't try to rack and stack it with US alliances. Think of it in terms of from zero mill no cooperation seven years ago, how far have we come?

Erin O’Brien: Well, that leads nicely into my next question, which is, could you go into a bit the history of US-Vietnamese relationships? Obviously, there are some points of deep tension there.

Greg Poling: I don't know if the War On the Rocks listenership is the kind who would know this, but the US fought a long war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s. The US-Vietnam did not normalize diplomatic relations until the Clinton administration. And from the mid '90s on, the ballast in the effort to deepen ties has focused heavily on dealing with the legacies of the war. So a huge focus in the '90s and aughts on identifying US POW and MIA's big focus in the last 15 years or so on cleanup, particularly of dioxin, Agent Orange, as well as unexploded ordinance in Vietnam. When Vice President Harris visited Hanoi in her first trip to Asia in 2021, you saw an announcement of a big US push to help Vietnam identify its own POW/MIAs from the war.

That willingness to tackle the legacy's issue more or less openly and honestly has done a lot of good. It's provided a lot of momentum on Capitol Hill in particular, which has shielded Vietnam from a lot of the human rights focused criticism that most partners who have Vietnam system would've gotten by this point. In a sense, normalization has helped, I think, exercise some of America's own political demons in a way that makes the US-Vietnam relationship a uniquely feel-good story for a lot of folks here in Washington. And you saw a lot of that highlighted in the joint statement this past weekend where […] is still a big component of what we're talking about cooperating.

Erin O’Brien: And how has the international community, I'm interested in particularly in China, responded to this upgrading in relations?

Greg Poling: Well, as you indicated in your intro, China said this is a reflection of a Cold War mentality. I would also argue that if an American sneezes anywhere in Asia, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson in Beijing will say that it's evidence of a Cold War mentality or containment strategy. So I don't think anybody should care all that much what China says diplomatically about this.

What's interesting is that Vietnam, given its two millennia plus history with China, is pretty good at managing the inevitable tensions with the northern neighbors. So just before President Biden arrived, the head of the External Affairs Department of China's communist party was in Hanoi for meetings. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh of Vietnam this week went to China for a multilateral summit. And there's rumors that President Chinh will eventually visit Hanoi, which would make sense because General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong was the first foreign leader to go visit Beijing after the party Congress in China last year. So Vietnam is trying to manage the displeasure, but the displeasure is unavoidable.

I think one of the other arguments that was almost certainly made for why they should just skip all the way to the top tier of relations, skip over the middle level here is that China was going to be mad no matter what. So why go through it twice? Why do it once now and then once five or 10 years from now when US-China relations are probably going to be even worse? Might as well rip the bandaid off.

Erin O’Brien: But do you think there could be any sort of real response or any kind of provocation from China in response to this partnership?

Greg Poling: I think it'll be limited. I'm sure that there will be opportunity costs in the next six months. There will be things that may have happened between China and Vietnam that will now be delayed as a sign of displeasure. Most, if not all, of that will probably be unseen by those of us on the outside because it'll happen at the party-to-party level between the two communist parties. But whatever the costs are, Vietnam is clearly now calculated, that they are worth paying and that they are far outweighed by the additional deterrence, the ability to balance against China that Vietnam gets from a closer economic and strategic relationship with the United States.

Erin O’Brien: All right. Well, this was extremely helpful in understanding this upgraded partnership. Thank you so much for coming back on the WarCast. I'm looking forward to speaking to you again soon.

Greg Poling: Thank you, Erin.