Vietnam wants U.S. help at sea and chinese help at home
Over the past four years, the Biden administration has invested significantly in expanding and deepening the U.S. defense relationship with Vietnam. These efforts reached new formal heights during President Joe Biden’s state visit to Hanoi in September 2023, when the two countries inaugurated a comprehensive strategic partnership.
For the United States, pursuing defense cooperation with Vietnam has been an important way to act on “shared security interests” in the Indo-Pacific—especially countering Chinese activity in contested maritime areas. This emphasis was clear during a meeting between Biden and Vietnamese Communist Party general secretary To Lam in New York last September: The leaders discussed “working together to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific” and “reaffirmed the importance of maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific—especially in the South China Sea.”
A narrow focus on expanding defense ties, however, can lead to misleading conclusions about the true status of the relationship. Vietnam has its own interests and has charted its own course in ways that Washington has failed to recognize. Most consequentially, even as Hanoi courts U.S. assistance on regional maritime defense, its leaders are deepening already intimate internal security ties with Beijing at an even faster pace—welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping for a visit in December 2023, just three months after Biden’s trip, that Vietnamese leaders referred to as a “historic milestone.”
Vietnam’s dual outreach doesn’t mean its burgeoning relationship with the United States is fake or insincere. Hanoi has actively sought Washington’s support to counter severe and material Chinese threats to Vietnam’s sovereignty and maritime claims in the South China Sea. But the partnership has a narrow scope. When push comes to shove, Beijing exerts substantial, probably growing, influence on a critical issue to Hanoi’s leadership: regime survival. Washington should not be surprised if Chinese leverage and privileged access constrain and undermine U.S. influence-building efforts.
Recent reporting suggests that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump may travel to Vietnam this year to mark the 30th anniversary of the two countries’ normalization of relations. Improving relations with Vietnam was also a priority in the Defense Department under the first Trump administration, during which Trump visited Vietnam twice. This time around, a few things are different. As the new administration crafts the next phase of U.S. strategy toward Vietnam, it must avoid overconfidence. Absent a clear-eyed understanding of Hanoi’s current hybrid security strategy and serious reckoning with new competitive trends in Asia’s security landscape, U.S. leaders risk overestimating their influence in Vietnam—and potentially, much of Asia.
The Biden administration has centered its Asia policy on strengthening alliances and partnerships. The “align” pillar of its “invest, align, compete” strategy toward China, in particular, has found a welcome reception in countries, such as Vietnam, seeking to defend their interests against an increasingly capable and coercive China.
Hanoi and Beijing each lay claim to the Paracel and Spratly islands and have fought episodically for control over those South China Sea territories. From 2013 to 2016, in particular, China pursued large-scale land reclamation and established formidable military infrastructure on several disputed features. Although the United States does not formally take sides in sovereignty disputes, it has—after decades of estrangement—been increasingly responsive to Vietnam’s concerns as China’s position in the South China Sea has strengthened.
The Biden administration has highlighted its success in augmenting the defense relationship with Hanoi, making maritime security cooperation a centerpiece of the comprehensive strategic partnership. U.S. officials identified Vietnam as a “critical swing state” whose growing cooperation could prove “decisive” in the region’s burgeoning great-power rivalry.
In 2016, after a period of intense Chinese activity in the South China Sea, the United States finally lifted a long-standing embargo on lethal arms sales to Vietnam. Washington and Hanoi also launched several cooperative initiatives, endorsing and updating a joint vision statement on defense relations last year.
The March 2018 visit of the U.S. aircraft carrier Carl Vinson to Danang—the first such port call since the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1975—marked a new level of defense cooperation. Subsequent naval visits have included two other carriers and elements of their strike groups, as well as the U.S. Navy 7th Fleet flagship and a U.S. Coast Guard vessel calling at Cam Ranh last summer. These visible shows of support are complemented by growing depth and sophistication in U.S. arms transfers, most recently the November 2024 delivery of T-6 trainer aircraft (and an indication that F-16s could be next), as well as a prior transfer of two cutters and 18 patrol boats. Most of this defense cooperation is maritime in nature, but cybersecurity is another growth area.
The steady drumbeat of new “firsts” in the U.S.-Vietnam defense relationship is consistent with the perception that “there is nowhere on earth more fearful of Chinese hegemony than Vietnam.” This may be so—but overlapping regional security concerns are only one facet of Hanoi’s threat perceptions. As Vietnamese analysts observe: “If Vietnam goes with China, they may lose the country. If they go with [the] U.S., they may lose the regime.”
This dilemma encapsulates Hanoi’s hybrid strategy, which seeks to commit both great powers to underwriting different aspects of Vietnam’s security. Growing cooperation with the United States, therefore, does not mean that Hanoi will be willing to sacrifice its relationship to Beijing for the sake of ongoing, or even increased, support from Washington.
Even as U.S.-Vietnam defense ties mature, Hanoi has cultivated a deep security partnership with China. Unlike cooperation with Washington, however, which focuses on external defense and regional maritime security, Vietnam’s security cooperation with Beijing focuses on shoring up both regimes against threats to party rule.
Xi’s highest national security priority is “political security,” which operationally speaking means the security of the socialist system, Chinese Communist Party leadership of that system, and Xi’s place as the core of the leadership. U.S. national security strategists must accept that Vietnam’s leaders are similarly oriented around political security. This has played out over the course of the past two years in the frequency and seniority of internal security interaction between China and Vietnam. Vietnam’s leaders have met with every part of China’s domestic security apparatus—the public security minister, state security minister, justice minister, head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, head of the People’s Armed Police, etc.—often more than once.
Placed against the parade of Chinese security ministers passing through Hanoi or hosting counterparts in Beijing, Washington’s working-level efforts to increase the participation of women in law enforcement (in keeping with the United Nations’ Women, Peace, and Security agenda) are laudable but do not address the fundamental security needs that drive Vietnam’s strategic choices.
Hanoi’s prioritization was on vivid display during Xi’s visit to Hanoi in December 2023. Xi called on both sides to “prioritize national political security, ensure the red flag of socialism not to be changed, and spare no effort to prevent, defuse and contain all kinds of political and security risks.” Vietnam, in turn, welcomed and supported Xi’s Global Security Initiative, which Chinese analysts have described as a foreign-policy extension of Xi’s regime-focused comprehensive national security concept.
To implement this cooperation, China engages with Vietnam’s police, security, and intelligence organs to maintain “social stability and ethnic unity.” In 2024, Lam, then internal security chief, stepped into Vietnam’s top leadership role. In the months preceding his ascent, Lam had led a drive to “strengthen cooperation between China’s law enforcement and security departments and Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) in the fields of security and intelligence, especially in safeguarding regime security and institutional security.”
In August, during Lam’s state visit to Beijing, his replacement as public security minister, Luong Tam Quang, met with both Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong and State Security Minister Chen Yixin. The state visit followed joint anti-terrorism exercises between the MPS and the People’s Armed Police. Vietnam has also participated in Chinese police training.
Even as the Pentagon works with Vietnam’s Ministry of National Defence toward a vision of “regional peace and prosperity” that depends on countering China at sea, Vietnam’s internal security apparatus has pursued close ties with China to counter liberal influence and opposition forces—many of which they believe emanate from the United States and its global democracy promotion agenda.
Vietnam’s basic security principles more closely resemble China’s, with decades-old commitments to counter “human rights and democracy ploys to interfere in Vietnam’s internal affairs.” Today, its internal security cooperation with China focuses on “intelligence exchanges, anti-interference, anti-separatism, and strengthening experience sharing and cooperation on preventing the ‘peaceful evolution’ of reactionary and hostile forces, ‘color revolutions,’ and separatism.” This fits in a broader arc of Chinese security cooperation focused on domestic threats along its regional periphery, whether these are joint counterterrorism exercises with Central Asian partners inside Xinjiang or a joint research center with Cambodia to study how to prevent color revolutions.
This strategy of dual-track, non-monogamous security cooperation shows Vietnam’s intent to chart an autonomous course amid intensifying regional and global strategic competition. This strategy has its origins in the Cold War, when Vietnam’s alignment with the Soviet Union made it a target of Chinese attack; Russia’s war in Ukraine seems to have increased Hanoi’s concern about being trampled by great-power rivalry.
In 2019, Vietnam’s added to its famous “three nos”—no military alliances, no alignment with one country against another, and no foreign bases—with a fourth: no threat or use of force. Yet this same national defense white paper also relaxed the three former categorical prohibitions: “Depending on circumstances and specific conditions, Viet Nam will consider developing necessary, appropriate defence and military relations with other countries on the basis of respecting each other’s independence, sovereignty, territorial unity and integrity.”
For Vietnam, security cooperation with both Beijing and Washington makes sense, as each great power offers very different kinds of security benefits. China helps Vietnam’s Communist leadership shore up domestic stability and regime security, which ironically could be jeopardized by increased linkage with the United States. Defense cooperation with Washington, on the other hand, allows Vietnam to counter Chinese maritime power projection and provides a diversifying hedge against strategic subordination to Beijing in the region.
In still other areas, including the region’s diverse and nontraditional security needs—including cybercrime and transnational human trafficking and drug smuggling—Hanoi cooperates with both Beijing and Washington, as opportunities arise. In July 2024, Vietnam and the United States launched the inaugural Law Enforcement and Security Dialogue; three weeks later, Vietnam participated in China’s regional law enforcement program, the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Framework, endorsing its most recent joint statement on combating transboundary crimes, which cited the riparian nations’ joint law enforcement patrols and made positive reference to China’s Global Security Initiative.
For a time, part of Vietnam’s pursuit of autonomy also involved importing arms from Russia, its traditional defense supplier. But Vietnam placed no new major orders with Russia in 2023—probably due to Russia’s own need to support its grinding and costly invasion of Ukraine. This suggests that Hanoi feels some urgency to look elsewhere to meet its defensive needs. Moscow’s unreliability will test the sustainability of Hanoi’s current course in the years ahead.
Vietnam’s choice to work closely on security affairs with both rival great powers should help retire the conventional wisdom that China’s only appeal to other countries is economic. Similar dynamics have already emerged in Serbia and Hungary (a NATO ally), as well as the United Arab Emirates, where a 30-year defense partnership with the United States has not precluded accelerating police and surveillance technology cooperation with China.
In some cases, Washington will be able to take steps itself or work with regional partners such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea to address legitimate nontraditional and internal security needs and provide capacity-building, training, and other assistance on issues such as counternarcotics and combating human trafficking.
In other instances, where the partner’s goal is explicitly authoritarian regime survival, Washington will have to recognize its limitations because Beijing is offering assistance that it cannot and should not mimic. Overall, U.S. policy will benefit by better accounting for the growing degree of agency wielded by third countries. Vietnam would be a good place to start.
By Sheena Chestnut Greitens & Isaac B. Kardon – Foreign Policy – January 13, 2025