Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Vietnam on Thursday, where he will stay for a two-day state visit, after on Wednesday he visited North Korea for the first time in 24 years (where he signed with dictator Kim Jong Un a agreement which includes among other things a mutual defense pact). Putin’s visit to Vietnam is notable especially from the Vietnamese point of view, given that the country has also hosted the heads of state of the United States and China in recent months: US President Joe Biden visited in September, and in December, President Xi Jinping of China.
Unlike North Korea, the variety of Vietnam’s foreign relations is the result of a specific policy, in which the country – which is led in an authoritarian manner by the Communist Party of Vietnam – in recent years has sought to expand its relations with Western countries, and tried to maintain neutrality and equidistance on two big issues: the Russian war in Ukraine and the difficult relations between the West and China. It is the so-called “bamboo diplomacy”, as Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party since 2011, defined it in 2021, the most important position in the country’s institutional system.
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To describe Vietnamese foreign policy, Trong compared it to the bamboo plant, typical of south-east Asia, which has “strong roots, a robust trunk and flexible branches”. Trong meant that, while maintaining the solid communist nature of the country’s internal politics, Vietnam did not want to become rigid in its relations with foreign countries, showing itself willing to dialogue even with countries that have conflicting relations with each other, such as the United States, China and Russia .
Relations with the United States are obviously, for historical reasons, those that have been most complicated for Vietnam to re-establish, given the long and bloody war fought before the reunification between North Vietnam, led by the communist dictatorship of Ho Chi Minh, and that of the South, anti-communist and supported by the United States. However, for years now the United States has established good diplomatic relations with Vietnam, especially after the progressive deterioration of those with China, and as a result the country has become one of the most important US trading partners in Asia.
For example, Apple, one of the most important US companies, has increasingly moved its production centers from China to other countries in recent years, in particular India and Vietnam. This after having for a long time relied almost exclusively on Chinese suppliers for the production of many of its products: the change occurred above all after US President Donald Trump began a controversial trade war with China in 2018, also threatening to impose a 15 percent tariff on all products of U.S. companies made in China. The situation has worsened with the pandemic and its mismanagement by the Chinese government, which imposed long and severe lockdowns, also causing major delays to industrial production.
With its equidistance policy, Vietnam has managed at the same time to attract US economic investments and maintain solid relations with China, which nevertheless remains its main trading partner. At the same time, as demonstrated by Putin’s visit, he has also been able to secure the support of Russia, which is his most important supplier of weapons and military equipment, and with which he collaborates on important exploration projects for oil and gas deposits in the sea. Southern Chinese.
At the moment it is not known whether new agreements between Russia and Vietnam will be announced during Putin’s visit, and indeed it is probable that the latter will once again try to remain cautious and open to “flexible” relations so as not to antagonize other countries. Le Hong Hiep, researcher and coordinator of the Vietnam studies program at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, a study center in Singapore, told the Financial Times to believe that «Vietnam will be wise enough to ensure that the visit does not damage its relations with the United States and Western partners: it has been able to maintain good ties with all major powers, and this plays an important role in helping the Vietnam to attract investments from various partners.”
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