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WALL STREET
JOURNAL
China-U.S. Rivalry Spurs Vietnam to Look for New Comrades Vietnam is intensifying efforts to build stronger trade and security relationships with countries like India, France and Japan
By James Hookway
Vietnam is using new security and trade partnerships to shore up its ties around Asia and beyond, as it seeks to avoid getting caught up in growing tensions between the U.S. and China, which look set to intensify as President-elect Donald Trump takes office. The maneuvering is a sign of how countries in Asia are having to adjust their policies on the fly following the collapse of President Barack Obama’s Pacific trade deal and lack of clarity over the direction the U.S. will take toward the region. After visits from the leaders of France and India in recent months, on Monday Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with top Vietnamese leaders to discuss business and security. “I think the need to get serious about developing multiple strategic relationships was driven home by the election of Donald Trump,” said Jonathan London, an expert on Vietnam and a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “He’s an unknown quantity.” Vietnamese officials say their strategy now is to place Hanoi at the center of as many trade pacts and security arrangements as feasible, while also smoothing over the country’s relationship with China when possible. The two countries fought a brief border war in 1979 and continue to contest each other’s claims to a swath of the South China Sea along Vietnam’s long, snaking coastline. “Vietnam will continue pursuing a policy of befriending all countries, multilateralizing and diversifying relations on the basis of independence, self-reliance and international law,” Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh said in a statement earlier this month. This need to find additional partners is especially acute for Vietnam. In recent decades, the communist-run state has reinvented itself as a trading nation and is heavily dependent on the free navigation of the South China Sea. Economists held it up as one of the biggest potential beneficiaries of the stalled Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have provided better access to the American market, already its largest. For the U.S., Vietnam is a fast-growing economic partner and an important ally in ensuring that the busy shipping lanes off the Southeast Asian country’s coast remain unimpeded by China’s growing commercial and military influence. In July 2015, Nguyen Phu Trong became the first general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam to visit the White House where he met with Mr. Obama. Last May, Mr. Obama visited the country and dropped a decades-old arms embargo, seen as an effort to definitively move the two countries beyond their Vietnam War past. Not long after, two U.S. Navy warships docked at the strategically-placed South China Sea port at Cam Ranh Bay for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War. The incoming administration could take a more hawkish approach in its China policy, which might be a positive for Vietnam. Mr. Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during a confirmation hearing that China should be barred access to its new artificial islands in the South China Sea. But the new administration’s stance on boosting domestic manufacturing could hurt the country. Vietnamese officials have privately said they are uncertain about what to expect. An intricate web of security and trade alliances to bring in more foreign navies and help keep the busy waters open for trade, increasingly looks like the best option. In Hanoi Monday, Mr. Abe said that Japan would supply Vietnam with six new coastal patrol boats in addition to the six it earlier provided, saying they would improve Vietnam’s ability to police its own waters. He also provided over a series of investment and joint-venture signings, including Mitsubishi Corp.’s investment in a thermal-power plant. “The peace and prosperity of this region depends on whether these seas will be kept open to free navigation. We will work with Vietnam so that the basic rules of maritime conduct – freedom of navigation, rule of law and peaceful resolution of conflict – will become firmly established,” Mr. Abe said. In a sign that Japan may be pursuing a similar approach to Vietnam, Mr. Abe has also visited the Philippines, Australia and Indonesia this month. Earlier, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Vietnam in September, sparking a new security arrangement that has seen India agree to train Vietnamese fighter pilots. India has also been negotiating to sell missile systems to Vietnam, which relies heavily on Russia for its military hardware. Last week Indian media reported that the two countries were now in talks on selling India’s Akash surface-to-air missile system to Hanoi. French President François Hollande also arrived in September to discuss trade, with Vietnam’s free-trade agreement with the European Union due to take effect early next year. It is a strategy that risks annoying China. An opinion piece in the nationalist-leaning Global Times newspaper in Beijing expressed concern that a missile deal between India and Vietnam might be “stealthily aimed at China,” and could create disturbances in the region. “China will hardly sit with its arms crossed,” it said. Carlyle Thayer, professor emeritus at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, says ultimately Vietnam’s goal is to avoid having to choose sides between the U.S. and China. “Vietnam’s web of strategic partnerships serves to insulate Vietnam from Sino-U. S. competition and provide Vietnam with the means to maneuver among the major powers in order to protect its independence,” says Mr. Thayer. Still, the new strategy doesn’t mean that Vietnam has been neglecting China, its largest trade partner. Indeed, when outgoing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the country last week as part of his final overseas tour, Mr. Trong, Vietnam’s most senior leader, was visiting China’s leaders in Beijing. —Vu Trong Khanh and Mitsuru Obe contributed to this article.
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