Opinion | How US-Vietnam alliance blossomed as rivalry between China and the West intensified

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

So goes an ancient Middle Eastern proverb, which has reverberated across millennia with strategic pungency. In many ways, the same logic is driving one of the unlikeliest alliances of the 21st century, namely between the United States and Vietnam.

What has brought these two former arch-enemies together is a combination of greed, in the form of booming bilateral trade, and a shared fear of emerging threats in the post-American era, especially in Asia.

And it’s precisely China where these two impulses have intersected in a singular strategic focus. The upshot is a blossoming silent alliance which has grown in proportion to an intensified strategic rivalry between China and the West.

Amid the ongoing Sino-American trade war, Western and Japanese companies have shifted their investments to Vietnam. By far, the Southeast Asian country, which has also attracted mainland Chinese investors dodging American tariffs, is the greatest beneficiary of the economic cold war between the US and China.

While much of Asia frets over the direction of the trade war, Vietnam is quietly welcoming diverted investments and rapidly replacing foregone Chinese light-manufacturing exports to America. Vietnam has also been a beneficiary of the West’s trade diplomacy.