When Joe Biden assumes the presidency in January 2021, American foreign policy will undergo a reset. This will include returning to diplomatic norms, reestablishing America’s unwavering commitment to democracy, underscoring US fidelity to NATO, and strategically reengaging China.
With more than four decades of foreign policy experience, Biden will bring a level of reassurance to the international community. But China will still remain a complex engagement for the US, one defined by President Xi Jinping’s extraordinary political savvy and ability to play the long game as well as his country’s growing economic clout and three million strong military.
Biden’s China reset will necessarily retain elements of President Donald Trump’s get-tough policy, which for objective reasons remains popular among many Democrats and Republicans across the country, including in Congress. That China is America’s third-largest trading partner and a fierce and often unfair economic competitor is a dynamic well understood.
Biden’s approach to China will be like that of his predecessors. Yes, he will engage Xi directly. He will also deepen economic and security ties with Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asian nations. Partnering with ASEAN states has been a staple in America’s regional approach for decades, as most recently exhibited in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade agreement that encompassed many Asian countries including Vietnam. The goal of the TPP was in no small part was to help signatories develop market opportunities beyond those with China and better stabilize the region’s economies.
However, in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP, along with the lack of post-TPP regional pacts, Biden must develop new initiatives for the US to regain its Asia footing. While he can seek new pacts — and likely will — in the near term, Biden will underscore and build on existing partnerships and other agreements. What will speak loudly in the coming months is which Southeast Asian nation (or nations) Biden will engage with the most, as such may reveal the new president’s broader approach towards Asia and China in particular.
Biden arguably should focus on one Southeast Asian nation, perhaps more than any other, to leverage anew America’s regional position, boost a developing economy, improve US trade, and check China’s might.
Vietnam is that nation.
Vietnam is a quickly advancing nation with an industrious and creative people. It has boosted its manufacturing base while moving headstrong into the world’s gig economy. Its government and business leaders are attracting new foreign investment and are dramatically developing new ports and urban infrastructure. And Hanoi is negotiating new partnerships well beyond Asia, including with the EU. Indeed, Vietnam’s economy is expected to be among the world’s fastest growing in the years to come.
Moreover, Vietnam’s trade with the US is growing year over year, as are US-Vietnam military ties. Recent bilateral agreements have also emphasized people-to-people cultural and educational engagements. Finally, Vietnam’s strategic position on the South China Sea cannot go unnoted.
While Vietnam has moved up over the past decade in America’s regional policy, it has never been center stage. That should change. The new Biden administration has every reason to deepen its ties with Vietnam — not only for selfish economic reasons but for strategic security reasons, too, especially concerning China.
America’s Modern Relationship with Vietnam
The US began flipping the Vietnam script more than 25 years ago when US Senators John McCain and John Kerry, a Republican and Democrat and both noteworthy Vietnam War veterans, acknowledged their opposing views of the war and collaborated with President Bill Clinton to begin normalizing relations with America’s most painful 20th century military foe. In 1995, US-Vietnam relations were indeed normalized and bilateral relations, trade, and common security interests were reestablished and have been growing since. In 2007, the US and Vietnam signed a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement.
Biden is very likely the last person from America’s “Vietnam era” to be sworn in as president. He will enter the White House at age 78, mostly unencumbered of the reel-to-reel anguish that fewer and fewer Americans today can recall. If Biden is to write a leading role for Vietnam in his Asia policy, there is much to build on from previous presidents’ work.
When President Barack Obama visited Hanoi in May 2016, he touted the US-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership the two countries had launched three years earlier, noting that it “put our relationship on a firmer footing for decades to come” and opens up avenues for greater collaborations in education and research, trade, defense and security, human rights, and climate change. The year before Obama’s Hanoi visit, he welcomed General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong to the White House and the aims of the Comprehensive Agreement were reaffirmed in a US-Vietnam Joint Vision Statement.
When President Donald Trump hosted Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc of Vietnam in Washington, DC, in May 2017, the two leaders also underscored their nations’ commitment to the Comprehensive Partnership and vowed to step up cooperative engagement. Trump then visited Hanoi in February 2019 for his summit with North Korean Chairman Kim Jung-un, during which he had brief meetings with Vietnam’s then recently elected President Nguyen Phu Trong and Prime Minister Phuc.
Four successive US presidents have now visited Vietnam over the past two decades — in addition to Obama and Trump, Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush made trips in 2000 and 2006, respectively — signifying mutual commitment since the normalization of relations during the Clinton administration and the simultaneous lifting of the US trade embargo against Vietnam.
The Obama administration’s relationship with Vietnam was marked by two principal 2016 accomplishments: lifting a decades-long ban on the sale of US military equipment to the communist nation and signing the TPP, which included Vietnam and 11 other nations. Then-Vice President Biden was inherently a supporter of each and today has resulting goodwill and a diplomatic base to soon engage Hanoi.
Biden will undoubtedly advance American relations with Vietnam, and he should be, in due course, the fifth successive US president to visit Hanoi and perhaps other port cities important to bilateral trade, such as Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City.
Relative to other countries, however, the Biden administration should significantly elevate Vietnam in its approach to Asia, and China in particular, for five reasons.
- Demonstrate Continued Commitment to the Comprehensive Partnership
The seven-year-old Comprehensive Partnership is the new foundation for US-Vietnam relations and advances in economic prosperity, national security, human rights, and global public and environmental health.
The Obama administration was committed to progress in each of these areas. The Trump administration focused more on trade and defense than the pact’s human rights and climate change tenets. While the pact is in no way at risk from the incoming Biden administration — after all, it survived the Obama-to-Trump swing — the new president should recommit to it. Biden also can rebalance the emphases.
Biden should also accentuate the “education cooperation” goals in the 2013 partnership agreement, which Obama spoke of in his 2016 Hanoi address (and which Trump and Phuc noted, too, in their 2017 meeting). In 2019, Vietnam ranked sixth among countries whose students traveled to the US for study. There is much goodwill to build on in educational partnerships, which also can be gateways to additional collaborations in science and technology research and production, cultural exchanges, and human rights improvements.
Listed first and thus prominently featured among the Comprehensive Partnership’s five tenets, however, is “maritime capacity building” — a euphemism for greater US military aid and equipment sales to Vietnam for enhanced patrol of its nearly 2,000-mile South China Sea coast and to promote freedom of navigation in the sea’s globally important shipping lanes. Indeed, Biden’s new Asia policy may well center around easing regional tensions and helping resolve disputes chiefly caused by China’s expansion-minded moves in the South China Sea.
- Get China’s Attention
Since rapprochement in the early ’70s, China has demanded every US president’s constant attention. China is now America’s third-largest food and goods trading partner (behind Canada and Mexico) and its military is the world’s largest. Thus, China is central in the portfolios of at least seven of the US government’s 15 executive departments (Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, State, and Treasury).
Candidate Biden’s foreign policy statements gave every indication that China, and Asia broadly, will be his principal economic and defense focus. “China represents a special challenge,” he said, and vowed “the United States does need to get tough with China,” especially to thwart continued industrial espionage, including pilfering American technology and intellectual property. But the new administration can begin sending public signals to Vietnam and other ASEAN states that mutual trade and security matters are top of mind, not the least of which is attention to China’s aggression in the South China Sea.
Few actions may deliver a stronger message to China — and signal to the international community on Biden’s new Asia policy — than the US building stronger ties with Vietnam. Given America’s modern history with Vietnam, such would be a story unto itself and the symbolism and significance of such relationship building would not be lost on anyone.
It would not be unreasonable for key Biden cabinet secretaries to begin traveling to ASEAN capitals — especially Hanoi, where talks would center on increased bilateral trade, potential additional US military sales to Vietnam (especially maritime equipment), and COVID-19’s economic and health impacts. A show should be made of each visit, with communiqués demonstrating in clear print a strengthening US-Vietnam relationship.
Such cabinet-level outreach could achieve both diplomatic and practical results: first, early signaling that Biden’s Asia policy is to continue nurturing America’s relationship with a nation on China’s southern border that has a prominent coast on the South China Sea; second, to begin laying plans and teeing up topics for Biden’s eventual visit.
- Strategically Support Vietnam — the ASEAN Member Most Willing to Push Back on China
The US and Vietnam share interest in stymieing China’s regional aggression, especially its efforts to gain more control in the South China Sea’s international waters and even into other nations’ economic exclusion zones.
While Vietnam and China are ideologically aligned and strong trading partners, there are noteworthy tensions. Vietnam has a 2,000-year cultural animus toward China, their most despised historic invader. It takes little to stoke the Vietnamese people’s anti-China angst.
Among the 10 ASEAN states, Vietnam is the one most willing to stand up to China’s more serious threats to sovereignty. Vietnam’s navy has not been shy to engage China in the South China Sea, such as in the 1974 Parcel Islands battle and the 1998 Spratly Islands skirmish, or, in more recent years, its frequent encounters with Chinese vessels straying into Vietnam’s coastal waters and threatening — and attacking — Vietnamese fishing and research vessels.
Vietnam walks a fine line between military and diplomatic engagement with China. It is not uncommon — indeed, it’s usually the case — that China comes out on top in its bullying maritime skirmishes with Vietnamese vessels. Vietnam, while often undersized and outgunned, is not easily intimidated. Its public pushback against China engenders popular support from its people and national assembly. Yet Vietnamese officials also remain dedicated to stepping up diplomatic engagements with Beijing to avoid future skirmishes, no matter how challenging that may be against a China resolved to be the dominant South China Sea presence.
On the whole, when Vietnam looks for an ally to have its back when standing up to China, few are there. Herein lies the void that the US can fill. Nothing may speak more loudly to Vietnam and its people — and to Beijing — than the US diplomatically backing its old foe’s stance against China’s aggression, whatever form that aggression may take.
- Increase US-Vietnam Trade
In Obama’s 2016 speech in Hanoi, he praised Vietnam’s growing economic “dynamism” that has “dramatically reduced extreme poverty” and “boosted family incomes and lifted millions into a fast-growing middle class.” His comments were made in the backdrop of an improved bilateral relationship, outlined in the Comprehensive Partnership, and his then hopes for a ratified TPP.
The US blundered when Trump, shortly after taking office, pulled America from the TPP, which Obama had committed to, but still faced challenges being ratified by the US Senate. Now, with the 10 ASEAN states plus Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand — and China — signing the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership to better enable low-barrier trade among nations comprising a third of the world’s population, the US is even more disadvantaged.
That the new Asian regional economic partnership has now been signed, with China as a signatory, and the world’s largest trading bloc created, Biden has greater incentive to quickly reengage Asian trading partners. Vietnam, also a RCEP signatory, should be among Biden’s first engagements, along with regional democracies Japan and South Korea.
There is clearly room to grow the US-Vietnam economic partnership. The US reported for 2019 a $56 billion goods trade deficit but a $1.2 billion services trade surplus with Vietnam. While the goods trade deficit demands attention, the modest $66 billion in imports to the US can be increased.
Additionally, the US should do more with US companies to facilitate additional foreign direct investment, especially in the manufacturing and technology sectors, so long as Vietnam continues improving its regulatory and legal business climate. Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment reports that in 2019, overall FDI reached $38.2 billion. As might be expected, FDI last year in Vietnam was principally from Asian nations, led by South Korea ($7.92 billion), Hong Kong ($7.87 billion), and Singapore ($4.5 billion), who combined for $20.3 billion or 53%. The US reported 2019 FDI in Vietnam totaling $2.6 billion, two-thirds less than South Korea and Hong Kong.
Biden should work toward the US joining a renegotiated TPP, or another similar trade pact, though he will face domestic political challenges in doing so given both popular and political skepticism of major trading agreements.
In the meantime, Biden’s new secretaries of agriculture, commerce, state, and treasury as well as his new trade representative should collaborate on a new trade initiative with Hanoi. It would be a strategic first step toward an elevated partnership and a signal to China on Biden’s attention to Southeast Asia.
- Underscore US Commitment to an Open and Secure South China Sea
Perhaps no single Southeast Asia defense-and-trade issue binds US and Vietnam interests more than a secure and freely traveled South China Sea. The US monitors China’s aggression in both international waters and in other Southeast Asian nations’ territorial or claimed waters as it explores for oil and gas and to fish. Biden understands all this and knows he must assert US regional interests. He can best do so by continuing to back Vietnam’s and other South China Sea coastal states’ interests.
The South China Sea’s shipping lanes accommodate $3-5 trillion or more of maritime shipping, including more than $1 trillion to the US. About one-third of the world’s crude oil is shipped through the South China Sea, especially from the Middle East through the Strait of Malacca.
Fish, oil, and gas are the most prominent resources to claim, prize, and defend — with fish resources being especially important to the region’s coastal states. The fishery around the Spratly Islands are claimed in part by several nations.
The US has historically focused on freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, as it is in the interest of the international community that no single nation dominate its shipping lanes. The US remains mindful of coastal states’ disputes over territorial waters and fishery and energy resources, and has often offered dispute resolution assistance. The Biden administration is not expected to alter this overall US position. But Biden may indeed double down on China’s maritime aggression.
China’s most brazen move to exercise outsize influence in the South China Sea is, of course, its work since 2013 to develop in the Spratly Islands more than 3,000 acres on seven new islands that previously did not exist, and on those new lands build airstrips and port facilities and install anti-aircraft and other defense artillery. This is a threat to freely navigable waters and other nations’ access to important natural resources, even in their own economic exclusion zones.
Biden can build upon the Trump administration’s recent strong statement against China’s bullying in the South China Sea. In July 2020, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo strongly underscored America’s commitment to “preserve peace and stability, uphold freedom of the seas in a manner consistent with international law, maintain the unimpeded flow of commerce, and oppose any attempt to use coercion or force to settle disputes.” Pompeo rightly called China’s aggression in the South China Sea “unlawful” and an “unprecedented threat” to other regional coastal states. More particularly, Pompeo aligned US policy with a 2016 international tribunal ruling rejecting in whole China’s many South China Sea territorial and resource claims, notably around the Spratly Islands.
In 2010, the US and Vietnam commemorated the 15th year anniversary of their normalization of relations by conducting joint naval exercises in the South China Sea and has done so every year since, all focusing on non-combat maritime search-and-rescue and safety training. The US also joined last year with the 10 ASEAN states in joint naval exercises.
Further, the US has ramped up its maritime equipment and training expenditures. The US State Department reported this summer that the US has authorized more than $50 million in defense equipment and technology sales to Vietnam over the past five years and has more than $130 million in military equipment sales underway. Additionally, and significantly, over the last three years the US has sold to Vietnam two refurbished former US Coast Guard vessels and has funded Vietnam’s purchase of two dozen patrol boats.
The annual US-Vietnam joint naval exercises and the US sale of military equipment, technology, and vessels has China’s attention. The annual joint non-combat training exercises routinely invite Beijing’s protest. However, the US and Vietnam will continue their joint annual naval exercises to complement growing economic ties and security partnership in China’s backyard.
Biden’s Golden Opportunity with Vietnam
During US presidential interregnums, it is frequently noted by the president-elect that the US has only “one president at a time.” Biden has said this, too. Since his November election, Biden has fielded congratulatory calls from heads of state around the world but, per tradition, has refrained from speaking publicly in ways that may confuse others as to what America’s position is on any given issue. Trump is president until January 20, 2021, and his policies rule.
When Biden takes over, however, he will move on from what many world leaders have found over the past four years to be a US foreign policy aimed to disrupt, disrespect, and undermine if not disassemble long-standing alliances. Biden’s return to diplomatic norms will be welcomed the world over.
This is not to say that Biden will not continue Trump’s tough stance on China. He will. The US engagement with China will continue to be the difficult balance between fairer bilateral trade and checking Beijing’s military might.
Indeed, there is no bilateral relationship that affects the world more than that between the US and China. This is even truer regionally. And that puts Vietnam — among the world’s fastest-growing economies who occupies a most strategic geographic position — at the center of the US’s Asia policy.
Biden can move to partially but prominently center his Asia policy on Vietnam, recognizing and promoting a nation whose American assistance in its contemporary rise is testament to healed wounds, acknowledged ideological differences, and common strategic interests.
In doing so, Biden will burnish his own foreign policy prowess and enhance America’s standing in an important part of the world.
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L. Preston Bryant, Jr., is a senior vice president at McGuireWoods Consulting in Richmond, Virginia, USA, where he focuses on economic development and infrastructure matters. He served as Virginia’s environmental secretary from 2006 to 2010 and as President Obama’s chair of the National Capital Planning Commission from 2009 to 2018.