THE
HANOIST A
new breed of diplomat for
Vietnam By The Hanoist
When Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh
Minh speaks to international audiences, he usually
does so without a translator. At 53 years old,
Minh's relative youth and proficiency in English
set him apart from his predecessors.
But
he is not unique among his present diplomatic
colleagues. Hanoi's current crop of senior
diplomats, appointed following the 11th Congress
of the Vietnamese Communist Party in January
2011, tend to be younger and
more cosmopolitan than the dour communist
officials who have historically been the face of
the country.
This stylistic change
reflects the coming of age of diplomats who
studied in top American schools in the 1990s as
Vietnam opened up. It also comes at a critical
time in the country's foreign relations. As the
second-largest country (after Indonesia) in the
10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), Vietnam is increasingly seen as a key
player in regional issues.
At the same
time, Hanoi is engaged in a web of bilateral
security dialogues with the United States,
Australia, Japan, Korea, India, France, Great
Britain and Russia, all in an unspoken effort to
balance against a rising China. Vietnam and other
ASEAN states are locked in a sovereignty struggle
with China over potentially oil- and gas-rich
areas of the South China Sea.
The ability
to comfortably converse with foreign counterparts
is obviously critical to a diplomat's
effectiveness and perceived image. The official
biography of Nguyen Quoc Cuong, Vietnam's current
ambassador to the US, states that he is "fluent in
English". That is a description that could not be
applied to previous Vietnamese ambassadors, whose
halting English reportedly left audiences
sometimes confused.
Like his boss the
foreign minister, Cuong is a graduate of the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
University, one of the leading international
relations programs in the US. Le Hoai Trung, the
current Vietnamese permanent representative to the
United Nations, is another Fletcher graduate. With
the prodigious number of Vietnamese government
officials who are alumni of the school, one might
think a "Fletcher mafia" is calling the shots at
Vietnam's Foreign Ministry.
To understand
how far Vietnamese diplomats have come, consider
the situation of Le Van Bang, who was caught
illegally digging for clams on Long Island, New
York, in 1994 while he was ambassador to the
United Nations. Bang and his driver ''acted like
they didn't speak English when they were
confronted by the harbormaster", according to the
local prosecutor.
Ultimately, no charges
were applied when Bang claimed diplomatic
immunity. (Bang went on to become the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam's first ambassador to the US
when Hanoi and Washington normalized relations the
following year.)
Rights and
security A key question for Vietnam
watchers is how the generational shift underway at
the Foreign Ministry might affect policy. Will
communist Vietnam become more Western and open to
diverse political currents, or will it be even
more determined at maintaining the country's
authoritarian status quo?
A test case will
be human rights, which is often a point of
contention in relations between Vietnam and
Western democracies. While Vietnam's top diplomats
rarely divert in public from the party line, they
are probably keenly aware of the international
repercussions from their government's poor
human-rights record.
Hanoi's crackdown
against political dissent - widely documented by
international human rights groups - is perhaps the
biggest stumbling block to establishing a
strategic relationship between the US and Vietnam.
American officials from Senator John McCain to
Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell have
recently emphasized that Hanoi must improve on
human rights before the US can consider selling it
military hardware.
America is not alone in
highlighting rights in its relations with Vietnam.
France reportedly suspended security talks with
Vietnam last year following the detention of Pham
Minh Hoang, a high-profile blogger with dual
French-Vietnamese citizenship. The security
discussions are now slated to resume following
Hoang's early release from prison in January.
There are also looming questions about how
much high-level influence the Foreign Ministry
really wields. Tradeoffs will have to be made as
the Hanoi leadership calibrates between closer
ties with America, which is a perceived threat to
internal security through pressure on human
rights, and China, which is a danger to external
security as it seeks to dominate the South China
Sea. The views of the internationally sensitive
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the inward-looking
Ministry of Public Security may diverge on this
issue.
Significantly, there are currently
no Foreign Ministry representatives on the 14-man
Communist Party politburo, the ultimate political
power. As one of the two Foreign Ministry
officials on the 175-member Communist Party
central committee, Pham Binh Minh could
conceivably be promoted to the politburo in the
near term, but changes in the body's membership
generally only occur at five-yearly party
congresses. The next one is not scheduled until
2016. Without a seat at the table, Vietnamese
diplomats are still most likely executing rather
than deciding foreign policy.
Ironically,
Vietnam's last powerful foreign minister was
Nguyen Co Thach, the father of Pham Binh Minh. A
member of the politburo and deputy prime minister,
Thach served as top diplomat from 1980-1991.
Regarded as pro-Soviet and anti-China, Thach was
eventually eased out of office after Hanoi and
Beijing re-established diplomatic ties after
severing relations in the wake of a brief border
war in 1979.
Thach's tenure represented an
era when Vietnam was firmly in the Soviet camp.
Beginning in 1991, Hanoi pursued a new foreign
policy of "friends with everyone" as it sought
global integration while remaining one of the
world's last remaining communist states.
That policy has largely run its course and
Hanoi now faces the dual challenges of dealing
with an ascendant China and Western pressures for
political reform. And while Vietnam's new crop of
envoys are more savvy and fluent in the art of
diplomacy, they still lack the clout to deliver on
their policy preferences at a crucial juncture in
the country's international affairs.
The Hanoist writes on Vietnam's
politics and people.
(Copyright 2012
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