U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on June 20 that the United States’ improved relations with Vietnam don’t require Vietnam to sever ties with China or Russia.
Ms. Yellen spoke after Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on June 19 for a two-day state visit. Mr. Putin met with the communist state’s president, To Lam, and communist party leader Nguyen Phu Trong. The two countries signed 11 agreements on issues that ranged from oil and gas to nuclear science.
“Vietnam has a policy and strategy of working collaboratively with many different countries, and it is not a condition of our partnership that they sever their ties to Russia or to China,” Ms. Yellen said, when asked at a news conference in Atlanta if the new cooperation between Moscow and Hanoi raised concerns for the United States.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Ms. Yellen both visited Vietnam last year as Washington sought to deepen relations with the southeast Asian country to counter the Chinese communist regime’s expansion of influence in the region and to move its supply chains away from China.
China and Russia have formed an alliance to challenge the Western and democratic world, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While Russia has been heavily sanctioned by the international community, China has been the primary backer of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, providing considerable economic, political, and military support.
Meanwhile, trade tensions between the West and China have intensified. The West, led by the United States, has increased its sanctions on China’s high-tech industry as the Chinese regime has been using imported, sometimes stolen, Western technologies to develop its military.
This year, the United States and the European Union also significantly increased tariffs on Chinese green energy products because of the regime’s dumping practices, which are affecting the global electric vehicle and solar panel industries.
Vietnam’s close ties with Russia can be traced to decades ago. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union provided a new communist state in North Vietnam with vital military, economic, and diplomatic support for its survival. The Soviet Union also played an important role in the war between the United States and Vietnam, supporting the communist North Vietnam to take over South Vietnam. Later, when Vietnam and China fought the Sino-Vietnam War in 1979, Russia also played an important role in support of Vietnam.
In recent years, tensions between Hanoi and Beijing have been rising because of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) disputed claims to vast areas of the South China Sea, despite Vietnam’s economic dependence on China for trade.
“The East Asia strategy currently promoted by the U.S. government is mainly based on deterrence, hoping to contain communist China from all directions,” said Cheng Cheng-ping, professor of economics at Taiwan’s National Yunlin University of Science and Technology.
“Vietnam plays a very important role in this. So from many aspects, the United States now has a strong intention to establish a good relationship with Vietnam,” he said.
Wooing Vietnam
Mr. Cheng said more than 80 percent of Vietnam’s weapons and national defense equipment are Russian-made.“So if you look at that and historical relations, it is not easy for Vietnam to sever ties with Russia. In fact, its relationship with Russia is very close, which is much closer than with the United States. It would be unrealistic if the United States asked Vietnam to cut ties with Russia at this time,” he said.
Su Tzu-yun, researcher and director of the Division of Defense Strategy and Resources at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, shares the same assessment.
“The U.S. intervention [in geopolitics] is to try to win over Vietnam as much as possible, rather than using coercion to ask Vietnam to cut off its connections with China and Russia,” he told The Epoch Times on June 21.
“This will have better results because Russia and China also have conflicts of interest in Vietnam. For example, in some of the disputed waters in the South China Sea between China and Vietnam, Russian oil companies are drilling oil there.”
Mr. Su said the United States does provide Vietnam with some arms sales and trade, “which are of course attractive to Vietnam.”
Second Battlefield in Asia
Amid international isolation, Mr. Putin has recently visited three communist states in eastern and southeastern Asia. Right before his visit to Vietnam, Mr. Putin also visited North Korea and signed a mutual defense treaty with its communist leader, Kim Jong-un. In May, Mr. Putin made a trip to China to meet with CCP leader Xi Jinping.Mr. Putin said in Hanoi that he wanted to build a “reliable security architecture” in the Asia-Pacific region for “peacefully settling disputes,” while accusing the West of creating a security threat for Russia in Asia.
“No country should give Putin a platform to promote his war of aggression and otherwise allow him to normalize his atrocities,” a U.S. State Department spokesperson said in reference to Mr. Putin’s visit to Vietnam and other East Asian countries.
“If he is able to travel freely, it could normalize Russia’s blatant violations of international law and inadvertently send the message that atrocities can be committed in Ukraine and elsewhere with impunity,” the spokesperson said.
Mr. Cheng believes Mr. Putin wants to open a battlefield in Asia to distract the West, so that he can expand his war in Eastern Europe.
“And generally speaking, the future conflict between the United States and China in East Asia will continue to escalate. So it can be seen that no matter who will be the next U.S. president, there will be more and more economic sanctions [on China and Russia], and the confrontation of military deployment will also intensify,” Mr. Cheng said.
“So, whether China and Russia act as an alliance or individually, they have a strong intention to pull Vietnam closer.”
