By Ton Nu Thi Ninh
In order for the relationship to advance, both sides need to understand it from a broader and more balanced perspective.
Forty years after the end of the war and twenty years after President Bill Clinton lifted the U.S. embargo on Vietnam – thereby kicking off the ensuing normalization process – the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Vietnam is scheduled to visit the United States this week at the official invitation of U.S. President Barack Obama, the first ever such visit by the top leader in Vietnam’s political system. This visit will definitely mark another milestone in the relationship between two former adversaries provided that each side adopts an appropriate reading of what it means. That requires avoiding the extremes of either a dismissive view of the trip as a purely symbolic bilateral event or a simplistic one that it represents a case of “taking sides”.
There is little doubt that this is a milestone in the evolution of a bilateral relationship that could well have stalled due to its particular background and nature. Over the past two decades however, it has instead bloomed and expanded in a whole array of areas, including business and trade, education, science and technology, security and defense consultations on international and regional matters of common interest, and other political dialogues on mutually sensitive issues such as human rights and Agent Orange. The people to people contacts and exchanges, including through tourism and development projects often involving second generation Vietnamese Americans, as well as ever rising numbers of young Vietnamese coming to the United States for their higher education, provide a rich human dimension to the bilateral ties. It is not an overstatement to consider this relationship as having come of age.
At the same time, we need to put this visit in the broader context of Vietnam’s diplomacy since the early 1990s. Since then, Hanoi has sought broad engagement with all powers and countries, active international and regional integration together with the universally applicable principle of priority for the national interest. Such a foreign policy is more relevant than ever today. Observers will recognize that Vietnam’s diplomacy has been consistently committed to balance and realism: flexible balance in its relations with the different major powers near and far; and a realistic recognition that there needs to be mutual interest or give and take for relations among nations to be healthy and sustainable. Vietnam also understands that the new power realities in the world in general and the Asia-Pacific in particular require the employment of both the soft power of diplomacy and the hard power of economic and military muscle. In this way, Vietnam can leave its options open.
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