Joe Biden Strengthens Economic and Strategic Partnership with Vietnam amidst Washington-Beijing Struggles

All communisms are obviously not created equal. When Washington and Beijing are struggling to talk to each other, Joe Biden wants to strengthen his economic and strategic partnership with Vietnam, during a meeting with the number one of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, this Sunday in Hanoi in stride. of the G20.

“By examining common challenges, from the South China Sea to critical and emerging technologies, the United States and Vietnam will define a vision for confronting the 21^e century together, in the framework of a strengthened and energized partnership”, explained the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, ahead of the trip.

The two countries, which normalized their relations in 1995 despite the scars of war, and signed a bilateral trade agreement in the early 2000s, are already strong trading partners. From sneakers to phones, Vietnamese exports to the United States nearly doubled between 2019 and 2022, to $127 billion last year.

And “not only have Vietnamese exports to the United States increased considerably, but today the United States exports 20 times more to Vietnam than in 2002”, welcomed the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, at the end of July, during a trip to the country – Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken also visited recently.

” Open secret “

At a time of the recomposition of global supply chains and recurring conflicts with Beijing, it is now a question of moving up a gear, and Hanoi would be ready for it, according to Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia program. at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

“It’s an open secret that they will at least announce the move to a strategic partnership. And many rumors even suggest that they could skip this step and go directly to a global strategic partnership,” he explained during a press briefing at the end of August.

A “soup of words for those of us who live in the United States”, but a distinction which “really matters” for Vietnam, “a communist state with a rather rigid Leninist hierarchy in matters of diplomatic relations”, deciphers the researcher.

To date, only China, India, Russia and South Korea have this level of relations with Vietnam. And the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) launched by the Obama administration had been buried by Donald Trump, while Vietnam, among the signatories, was supposed to benefit the most from it.

“Rooting” of state enterprises

Bordering Vietnam, China follows the bilateral relationship with attention. While the United States has become less dependent on Beijing in recent years, Hanoi’s trade dependence on Beijing has on the other hand strengthened since 2010, analyzes a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) published on Wednesday.

“Vietnam sent 24% of its exports to the United States in 2010 and 29% in 2021, while increasing the share of its exports to China from 9% in 2010 to 20% in 2021”, illustrates the study conducted by Abigail Dahlman and Mary Lovely.

Vietnam also abstained in UN votes to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “caught between its desire to build relations with the United States and European countries, and its need to maintain ties with Russia to retain expertise for its weapons and not to destroy its long-standing ties with Moscow,” Joshua Kurlantzick explained last year, in a note from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

But the country, whose US State Department always points to the authoritarian nature of the regime, the corruption or the “rooting” of state enterprises, also knows how to play a role of mediator – Hanoi had thus hosted a summit between the States United States and North Korea in 2019.