FINANCIAL TIMES
22-2-19

Trump-Kim summit puts spotlight on Vietnam

Increasingly assertive nation emerges to play wider diplomatic role

John Reed in Hanoi

Nguyen Thang remembers the night in 1972, when he was 14, and Vietnamese artillery shot down a US B-52 bomber near his house in Hanoi. The heat when the plane crashed into Huu Tiep Lake was so intense it killed all the fish.

Mr Thang, sipping tea by the lake, where the plane’s wreckage remains half-submerged as a war memorial, says he bears no grudge against the Americans. “Vietnamese people don’t care about American imperialism any more,” he said. “We love money,” he said, rubbing his fingertips and laughing.

His cheerful dismissal of the past is typical in Vietnam, where the “American war” is a distant memory, a new generation is acquiring the bourgeois trappings of the middle class and Hanoians are preparing to host one of the biggest events in their city’s history: next week’s nuclear summit between US president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The event will for a few days put the new Vietnam and its postwar economic take-off at the centre of world affairs.

For a country of nearly 100m that through much of its history has had its fate decided in faraway cities, the summit will showcase both its economic reforms and its elegant capital, which bears architectural traces of Vietnam’s past dominance by China, then France, then the US, which it defeated in 1975. 

Since then, Vietnam has managed to mend fences with Washington, reform its command economy and emerge as one of south-east Asia’s top trading nations and magnets for foreign direct investment. Its leaders have positioned the country as a midsize regional diplomatic power by cultivating close ties with the US, Russia and other countries and speaking out more firmly than most of its neighbours against an increasingly assertive China.

Some even say its success could offer a template for North Korea’s long-term future should Pyongyang ever strike a meaningful deal with the US. “We are proud of what we have done,” said Bui The Giang, a veteran communist party member and former Vietnamese ambassador to the UN. “We are proud of the relations we have developed with other partners proactively.” 

Hanoi, already a magnet for foreign tourists, is increasingly selling itself as a venue for international events. The city hosted the World Economic Forum last year, and in 2020 will hold its first Formula One race.

“I think the summit will be a great opportunity for Vietnam to tell its success story to the world, thereby attracting more investor and tourist interest,” said Le Hong Hiep, a fellow at Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

According to Vietnamese officials and foreign diplomats, Hanoi actively lobbied to hold the summit, the second after the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore last June. 

Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, last year explicitly cited Vietnam as a model of the “brighter future” North Korea could build if it were to scrap its nuclear programme and restore relations with the US. Vietnam’s economy grew 7 per cent in 2018, when it also attracted a record $19bn of FDI, and it concluded talks on a free trade agreement with the EU. 

For Mr Kim, Vietnam was a logical choice as one of the few countries with a North Korean embassy that the security-conscious leader could reach easily. Mr Kim is due to arrive in Vietnam on Monday, two days before the summit.

While neither Vietnam or North Korea have released his programme, Vietnamese officials and foreign diplomats in Hanoi said Mr Kim’s itinerary would likely include a stop in Bac Ninh, the province west of Hanoi that is home to one of Samsung’s two huge Vietnamese manufacturing plants. The South Korean conglomerate makes half of its phones in Vietnam, accounting for about a quarter of the country’s export revenues. 

Officials and diplomats also expect the North Korean leader to visit Haiphong, Vietnam’s second-largest port city. The visit, they said, would highlight Vietnam’s success in building an export and FDI-driven economy. Vingroup, Vietnam’s biggest private conglomerate, has built a factory at a special economic zone that will use technology from Germany’s BMW, Bosch and other suppliers to build the country’s first homegrown car brand.

Depending on how closely he looks, Mr Kim will see a Vietnamese economy that is more investor-friendly and pro-business than that of many capitalist countries and, critics say, that sometimes favours private capital over worker rights and environmental protection.

“It’s kind of an 18th/19th century capitalism we have,” said Nguyen Quang A, a prominent civil society activist and former businessman. “Mr Kim can learn from Vietnam: what to emulate or to avoid.”

For Mr Trump, who famously avoided military service in Vietnam, this will be his second visit as president. Diplomats and officials expect the American delegation to stay at the Marriott Hotel, near Hanoi’s International Convention Center. Security has also been stepped up at the Vietnamese government guest house in the city’s Old Quarter and around the nearby Metropole hotel, leading to speculation that Mr Kim might stay there. 

Workers in the city this week were planting flowers and trees and hanging North Korean and US flags. Street vendors have begun hawking T-shirts describing Mr Kim by his Trumpian nickname “Rocket Man” or depicting Mr Trump in a traditional conical Vietnamese peasant hat.

And Hanoians are getting excited. “A lot of people don’t understand why they chose Hanoi,” said Nguyen Minh Ha, 21, a student. “People simply feel proud because Vietnam is holding a big meeting like this.”