Vietnam, squeezed between America and China, looks for new friends

The first Asian leader to reach Donald Trump by phone after he announced “reciprocal” tariffs in the Rose Garden on April 2nd was To Lam, the general secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party. He offered to eliminate all tariffs on American goods. Mr Trump praised Mr Lam in a subsequent post on social media. Mr Trump’s tone changed a few days later, however, when Mr Lam welcomed Xi Jinping, China’s leader, to Hanoi for his second state visit in three years. Mr Trump declared that the pair were meeting to work out, “How do we screw the United States of America?”

Few countries are as caught up in the geopolitics of the moment as Vietnam. It lies between America and China in many supply chains. The two countries are its two biggest trading partners. It is a communist dictatorship like China, but also spars with China over fishing and mineral rights in the South China Sea.

Under Mr Lam’s predecessor, Nguyen Phu Trong, who died last year, Vietnam pursued “bamboo diplomacy”—bending, but not breaking when bigger powers huff and puff. Other non-aligned countries have struggled, but Vietnam has emerged mostly unscathed. Though it has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, it gets none of the opprobrium reserved for the likes of India and South Africa.

How has Vietnam been able to do it? “They’re a bit of a special case, because they have enormous moral capital,” says Andrew Goledzinowski, until recently Australia’s ambassador in Hanoi. Mr Lam has also energetically pursued new trade, defence and diplomatic relationships, visiting 13 countries since becoming general secretary in August.

What does Mr Lam hope to achieve by all this globe-trotting? The priority seems to be to reduce Vietnam’s reliance on America and China. Closer economic co-operation with the European Union, with which it already has a free-trade agreement, would help offset reduced exports to America. Russia could help it develop cheap nuclear plants. South Korea, already a big investor, could also provide affordable weapons.

Mr Lam is looking to other middling powers, too, whether fellow free-traders in the Trans-Pacific Partnership or to a less open economic bloc, ASEAN. Vietnam has been a fairly passive member of the group, says Nguyen Khac Giang of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank in Singapore. But could Mr Lam try to liberalise ASEAN, which set up a free-trade area in the late 1990s but has done little to dismantle the non-tariff barriers that undermine it?■