US attitude towards Vietnam remains imperialist, not capitalist

Hanoi’s relationship with Washington since the end of the war has been one of remarkable redemption, but trade negotiations with Donald Trump show the scars remain.

As Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi dominated headlines last week with her election win, another Asian leader is tightening his grip on power.

Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary To Lam has emerged from the recent party congress embodying what former US ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius terms a “new era of the nation’s rise”.

The ambition is vast. Vietnam grew at 8.2 per cent last year: To Lam wants to reach, then sustain, a 10 per cent annual growth rate. The goal? For Vietnam to be in the top 20 highest-income countries per capita by 2045 – the centenary of Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence – and to beat the middle-income trap by 2030, the centenary of the founding of Vietnam’s Communist Party.

To Lam honours the system even as he reinterprets socialism. Indeed, “socialism” has been neatly packed away, and with it the shibboleths of the proletarian revolution, replaced by new homilies of the digital, green and cultural economy.

These are the sort of growth numbers that made fiscal eyes water in the 1980s with Asia’s “flying geese” economies – Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. But the aspirations are not without risk, and scepticism harries the optimism.

Most agree that To Lam has unshackled Vietnam’s growth potential. Osius refers to the recent streamlining of the nation’s bureaucracy as a “thoughtful, intelligent version of [Elon Musk’s] DOGE”. Others confirm that the country is like a coiled spring unbound – making this the third era of reform. The first followed the death of former General Secretary Le Duan in 1986, the second after Vietnam joined the WTO in 2007.

However, some retain doubts even as they acknowledge positive change. Adam McCarty of Mekong Economics told the Financial Review that “it is a new era for Vietnam. Previously, change was slow, growth reasonable, and citizens had substantive ability to resist authorities. Now, to achieve ambitious targets and plans, citizens are moved aside as needed. Authority has been centralised, and the corollary is that the lowest levels of power have lost some of their control over land, privacy and autonomy.”

McCarty acknowledges that the changes are impressive, but adds, “They have also entrenched an ongoing problem in Vietnam: the lack of a somewhat independent corporate sector. Big business and political leadership are now symbolically intertwined. This is not the Japan-South Korea model of competitive corporations.”

Herein lies one dampener on an otherwise bullish national mood, palpable in the ceaseless rattle and hum on Vietnam’s city streets. Some sources in the country raise similar issues to McCarty. One says, “To Lam is the first to have this kind of power and moral responsibility, but there is no ecosystem – his big plans need the very kind of political and social capital that is lacking.”

Corruption remains, and while other sources don’t doubt that the 10 per cent target can be reached, they question its sustainability over the longer term, worried that the pump priming to get there will be largely debt financed. As one says, “The rah-rah needs to be tempered.”

Weathering the Trump tariff storm

On foreign policy, Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy” is willowy still amid the Trump hurricane. The so-called “liberation day” tariffs were a “gut punch”, one analyst remarks, bringing back painful memories of Washington leading Hanoi to the altar of the TPP only for Uncle Sam to walk back down the aisle at the last moment.

Current negotiations on a trade deal, likely to be secured before To Lam visits Washington next month or in April, have witnessed moments of profound discomfort. Some in Hanoi are seething, saying “the Americans are not capitalists but imperialists”. In one phone call, where the Vietnamese expected Trump would rubber stamp a lower across the board tariff of 28 per cent (down from the previous 46 per cent), the US president apparently ranted “Who negotiated this? It’s terrible! Who is on this call with me? (Treasury Secretary Scott) Bessent?! [US Trade Representative Jamieson] Greer? Who is responsible!!?? This is not happening!” The Vietnamese were stunned, and US officials embarrassed. Hanoi, though, now eyes the same deal that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received: an 18 per cent tariff.

But a Vietnamese source worries whether the administration in Washington is cognisant of the consequences. He argues that the anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam is sometimes overstated, adding that “people are looking at China and wondering whether it might be the better alternative. This is telling us something about US-China strategic competition that is potentially far-reaching.”

US officials stress privately that their message to Hanoi has been blunt: “Be careful playing footsies with Beijing too much.” They argue Hanoi will throw China some bones with co-operation on high-speed rail, for example, but that on critical minerals, semiconductors and other areas with a high national security dimension, “Hanoi want us”.

It is true the relationship with Washington since the end of the war has been one of remarkable redemption. And a retired Vietnamese diplomat talks of the conscious need to move on: “We have had too many enemies in the past,” he says.

But he also observes that Vietnam’s neighbours benefitted from the war: “the aircraft that bombed us took off from Thailand; US troops took leave in the Philippines and Japan; Singapore offered logistical support; and Taiwan got some of the American pie too from that conflict.”

Scars of war

Vietnam, having seen off the Japanese, French, Americans and the Chinese in the last hundred years, has no “century of humiliation” like Xi’s China. But the scars of the American war, unsurprisingly, remain.

Tucked in beneath soaring skyscrapers in Ho Chi Minh City, almost trying to remain unnoticed, is the Pittman apartment building – the former headquarters of USAID. It was from here that the last US helicopter took off in April 1975 at war’s end. As I walk into the lobby, the concierge immediately holds up the iconic photo of the South Vietnamese scrambling up a ladder to reach the chopper on that fateful day of American defeat.

Pointing upwards, he asks me for 200 dong – less than a dollar. I reach level 9 and find a dilapidated bar, long since dry, strewn with rubbish and caked in dust. An American tourist does not stay long. But two local Vietnamese happily snap pictures on their iPhones.

The ladder still climbs to the very platform from where the chopper lifted off and angled away. And I notice that the outdoor furniture has been smashed up and piled in a corner, as if a funeral pyre.

By James Curran – The Australian Financial Review – February 16, 2026