Next week, President George W Bush
will welcome Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet
to the White House, the first Vietnamese head
of state to be received there since Nguyen Van
Thieu of South Vietnam called on Richard Nixon in
San Clemente, California, in April 1973 three
months after the signing of the Paris Peace
Accords in effect doomed his regime.
After the
reunification of Vietnam in 1975, it took the
United States two decades to establish full
diplomatic relations and another decade to approve
legislation extending permanent
normal trade relations to the
onetime enemy, an act which the 109th Congress
finally passed in its lame-duck session last
December.
Although Vietnam formally joined
the World Trade Organization (WTO) in January as
its 150th member and bilateral trade between the
United States and Vietnam topped US$9 billion last
year, there are still those who would invoke
inevitable disagreements between the two countries
to prevent the next logical progression in the
relationship: strategic partnership in the
interest of both.
Ever since the
normalization during the Bill Clinton
administration, officials on both sides have
prudently gone to great lengths to show that the
ties are not meant to threaten Chinese interests.
However, all the diplomatic niceties in the world
cannot obscure the fact that Vietnam brings to the
relationship a set of unmatched geopolitical
endowments that are of interest to any state
seeking a "hedge" in its relations with the
current rulers of the Middle Kingdom.
With
control over about half of the Spratly and Paracel
Islands - whose ownership it disputes with China
(as well as Taiwan and, in parts, Malaysia and the
Philippines) - as well as 3,444 kilometers of
coastline at the center of the vital sea lanes
through the South China Sea, Vietnam is
geographically critical to either the freedom of
those waters or their control.
Given its
ongoing disputes with Beijing over the South China
Sea - Vietnamese officials lament the fact that
their Chinese counterparts would not agree to
specifically mention the contested Paracel Islands
in the 2002 Association of Southeast Asian Nations
China declaration on diplomatic resolution of
conflicting claims in the region - Hanoi cannot
align itself with its larger neighbor on issues
relating to the sea, which not only has rich
fisheries, but also shows indications of major
petroleum and natural gas reserves.
(According to the most recent report by
the Energy Information Administration, Vietnam's
rather underdeveloped oil industry nonetheless
exported 1,092,000 barrels of crude to the United
States in March.) Moreover, Vietnam is the most
significant obstacle to Chinese hegemony over this
maritime domain.
The signing of a
Sino-Vietnamese border demarcation treaty in 1999
notwithstanding, there are still some 289 disputed
areas, totaling 235 square kilometers, along some
450 of the 1,350 kilometers of common frontiers.
Although the dispute is literally
millennial, it should also be remembered that the
two countries fought a brief, but bloody, border
war over this territory as recently as 1979,
during which the Chinese People's Liberation Army
penetrated some 30 kilometers into Vietnam before
being thrown back with at least 75,000 casualties.
Hence, while the Bush administration
justly deserves considerable credit for building
up the security relationship with Japan and India,
it should not overlook the geopolitical and
strategic assets which Vietnam offers along the
same lines as an "insurance policy" against any
creeping southward expansion by a China seeking
great-power status.
If the United States
has realpolitik reasons to want to draw closer to
Vietnam, the attraction is mutual. From Hanoi's
perspective, cultivating closer ties to Washington
not only facilitates access to American capital
and technology for Vietnam's economy - one of the
world's fasting-growing - and American markets for
the goods it produces, but also acts as an
external counterbalance to Beijing.
Sino-Vietnamese relations have improved
considerably in the years since the two countries
restored diplomatic relations in 1991, especially
after President Hu Jintao's visit to Vietnam in
October-November 2005. Hu's trip led to
commitments to strengthen economic ties and to
develop a business corridor running from Kunming,
the capital of China's Yunnan province, to the
port of Hai Phong in northern Vietnam.
Nonetheless, the commercial relationship
is not without its ambivalence, as both countries
are essentially competing for the same foreign
investments and the same markets for low-cost
manufactured products. And, like their
counterparts in many other nations, Vietnamese
officials are concerned about their rising trade
deficit with China.
Furthermore, as
Brantley Womack of the University of Virginia
documented last year in China and Vietnam: The
Politics of Asymmetry (Cambridge University
Press, 2006), the relationship between China and
Vietnam over the course of 3,000 years - arguably
the longest continual rapport of its kind between
any two states in world politics - has been
through "almost every conceivable pattern of
interaction among neighbors" from union to
alliance to competition by proxy to open conflict.
This long history, coupled with the
significant disparities in scale, has led Vietnam
inexorably to seek out regional and global
counterweights with which to balance against its
looming neighbor.
Vietnam joined Indonesia
and Singapore in pushing to include India,
Australia and New Zealand in the East Asia Summit
(EAS), despite China's "quiet resistance". (China
did succeed in structuring the EAS so as to
exclude direct US participation.) And there is
every reason to believe that Vietnamese leaders
believe that their national interests can be
better secured through an at least tacit strategic
partnership with the offshore United States than
in succumbing to the aspiring onshore hegemon next
door.
Although there has been expanding
security cooperation between the United States and
Vietnam - an International Military Education
Training accord was signed in 2005, and five US
naval vessels have visited Vietnam since 2003 -
there is no question of a formal alliance. There
is, however, considerable scope for strategic
convergence if stumbling blocks can be removed and
old mindsets overcome.
Without discounting
the importance of human rights and other concerns
about Vietnam's record raised by members of
Congress and others in Washington, one has to
recognize the tremendous progress made by Hanoi in
recent years. The White House announcement of
Nguyen Minh Triet's visit listed the agenda as
"our robust trade and economic relationship,
cooperation on health and development issues,
cultural and educational ties, and shared
commitment to resolving remaining issues stemming
from the war."
But it pledged that
"President Bush will also express his deep concern
over the recent increase of arrests and detentions
of peaceful democracy activists in Vietnam". The
announcement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
in Hanoi noted that the Vietnamese president had
said that the two countries "must keep channels of
communication open so as to increase their
understanding of each other and deal with their
differences for a long-term and stable
relationship" - implicitly acknowledging
Washington's domestic political needs and evincing
a willingness to engage them, rather than
dogmatically denouncing the former as "foreign
interference".
If Vietnamese leaders in
recent years have been disposed to put aside their
revolutionary ideological baggage in order to
pursue more concrete strategic objectives like
economic and social development and political and
military stability, it should be hoped that US
statesmen will have a similar clarity of vision
and the creative flexibility.
For America,
it is a unique opportunity to not only to promote
its ideals about free peoples and markets in a
society that is opening up, but also to advance
its national interests in a geostrategically
pivotal region.
J Peter Pham is
director of the Nelson Institute for International
and Public Affairs at James Madison
University.
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