When President Biden gets tough on China, can US count on Vietnam?

New leaderships give Washington and Hanoi a chance to boost ties, but Vietnam will be keen not to anger communist stablemate China

To win Hanoi’s trust, the US may need to tone down its human rights criticisms and take a tough line in the South China Sea

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American flags at the base of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP

Published: 5:00pm, 23 Jan 2021Updated: 11:33am, 18 Feb 2021

Vietnam must navigate the troubled relationship between the United States and China – its two most important trade partners – at a particularly complex time, just as new leaderships emerge in both Hanoi and Washington.

With Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president and a leadership shake-up expected at the Vietnamese Communist Party’s National Congress, which starts on Monday, experts say there will be opportunities in the months ahead to strengthen the relationship between Vietnam and its former Cold War foe. However, they caution, attempts to do so will be constrained by both Hanoi’s lack of trust in Washington and Washington’s criticisms of Hanoi’s human rights record.

While the growing US-China rivalry will elevate Vietnam’s importance to Washington, it will also make Hanoi wary of angering Beijing, they say.

The US and Vietnam normalised bilateral relations in 1995, two decades after the end of the Vietnam war. In 2013, under the presidency of Barack Obama (when Biden was vice-president), the former adversaries signed the US Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership, which is aimed at strengthening ties in a multitude of areas from politics, trade and defence to health, the environment, humanitarian assistance and legacy of war issues.

As the administration of Donald Trump had previously agreed to expand this partnership, the incoming Biden administration was likely to “follow suit”, said Carl Thayer, professor emeritus of politics at the University of New South Wales in Canberra.

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