When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the world was ushered into a new era of heightened great power rivalry and weakened international order. In Europe, countries such as Finland and Sweden responded to this by discarding neutrality and joining a military alliance in the form of NATO. But not so Vietnam, whose situation is in many ways similar to that of Ukraine. Like Kyiv, Hanoi lives next door to a far bigger and more powerful neighbor that harbors territorial and hegemonic ambitions against it.
Hanoi’s response to the war in Ukraine has been to strengthen its existing foreign policy paradigm entailing a delicate and dynamic omnidirectional balancing act, especially between the great powers.
Vietnam’s foreign policy paradigm resulted from its own historical experiences dealing with a Ukraine-like situation. As with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China in 1979 attacked Vietnam without provocation. The Chinese invasion occurred after Vietnam had secured a mutual defense treaty with the Soviet Union, a nuclear-armed great power. As Beijing explained it, the war was to “teach Vietnam a lesson.” But Hanoi did not learn the lesson once and for all. The lesson it learned has evolved over time, reinforced or modified by subsequent experiences.
This lesson had crystallized by the late 1990s into a defense doctrine known as the “three no’s” policy, which would evolve by the late 2010s into “four no’s.” The policy stipulates that Vietnam must not join any military alliance, not side with one country against another, not allow any foreign military bases on its soil, and not use force or threaten to use force in international relations. More than a year into the Russia-Ukraine war, these “four no’s” were elevated to become “guiding rules” within the “Strategy for Safeguarding the Fatherland in the New Situation,” adopted by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) in October 2023. The document serves as a kind of national security strategy.
The self-imposed restrictions of the “four no’s” do not work alone but are predicated on Vietnam’s “all people’s defense,” its membership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and a thick web of partnerships with global and regional powerhouses. These principles and relationships constitute the core architecture of how Vietnam provides security for itself in the world today.
With its multiple directions and interlocking ties, the web of partnerships serves as Vietnam’s “safety net” in the international arena. However, the Russia-Ukraine war has rearranged its configuration and caused a tear in this safety net. The conflict has deepened and intensified the strategic competition between the United States and the West on one side and Russia and China on the other.
Rather than building a new safety net, Hanoi has tried to fix and strengthen the existing one. The biggest task in this endeavor was to deepen relations with the United States without losing Russia’s trust amid growing hostility between the two countries. Another major task was to keep Moscow closer to Hanoi or at least neutral in the South China Sea disputes with Beijing despite the China-Russia strategic rapprochement. Vietnam has successfully resolved these tasks by taking one step backward and then two steps forward in its relations with the United States, while also accommodating Russia.
Russia-U.S. hostility following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 initially prompted Vietnam to postpone elevating its ties with the United States. Hanoi did not drop the goal of upgrading its existing “comprehensive partnership” with Washington to a “strategic” one, but as journalists in Hanoi were told in April 2022, this goal needed to be frozen to demonstrate Vietnam’s “independence, balance, and autonomy” in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. In May and again in July 2022, Vietnam canceled the planned visit of a U.S. aircraft carrier. In August and September 2022, Hanoi told high-ranking U.S. officials visiting Vietnam that it intended to upgrade the bilateral relationship “when the conditions are conducive.”
In the following months, Vietnam lobbied for a visit to Hanoi by U.S. President Joe Biden. After this was turned down, Vietnam lobbied instead for a phone call between Biden and its top leader, CPV General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. The Biden-Trong phone call took place in late March 2023, and was followed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Hanoi in April. A key result of Blinken’s visit was that Hanoi and Washington penciled July 2023 as a tentative date for Trong’s trip to Washington.
Meanwhile, Vietnam was negotiating with Russia a large arms deal worth $8 billion over 20 years, which would use the book of a joint Russian-Vietnamese oil venture to bypass Western sanctions.
In July 2023, a few days after the eventual port call of a U.S. aircraft carrier to Vietnam, the CPV’s foreign relations chief Le Hoai Trung was in Washington to discuss plans for the Biden-Trong summit meeting and an upgrade of the bilateral relationship. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan suggested that Biden would go to Vietnam in September 2023 after cutting short his participation at the G-20 meeting in India. Later, Sullivan also proposed a two-step upgrade to ties that would put the United States on par with Vietnam’s other “comprehensive strategic partners”: China, Russia, India, and South Korea.
Vietnam’s pragmatic leadership grasped the opportunity and agreed to the bold initiative. As I said in an interview with The Diplomat in September 2023, what really convinced the Vietnamese to “leapfrog” was the U.S. offer to turn Vietnam into a major high-tech and semiconductor hub embedded within U.S.-friendly supply chains. When the two countries formally raised their ties to the level of a “comprehensive strategic partnership” in September 2023, semiconductors were “the centerpiece of an action plan” adopted during Biden’s visit.
To further strengthen its web of partnerships, Vietnam elevated Japan, Australia, and France to its sixth, seventh, and eighth comprehensive strategic partners, respectively, in November 2023, March 2024, and October 2024. Vietnam is also weighing upgrading its ties with Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines to this highest level.
In line with Vietnam’s grand strategy, the deepening of Vietnam’s U.S. partnership necessitated some actions to reassure both China and Russia. Thus, in anticipation of future advancement in U.S.-Vietnam relations, CPV chief Trong traveled to China in late 2022, breaking a decades-long rule that saw Laos as the first destination abroad of Vietnam’s top leader after his election. The double upgrade of U.S.-Vietnam relations also prompted Hanoi to join Beijing’s “community with a shared future” in December 2023, ending Vietnam’s years-long resistance to the Chinese scheme.
Most recently, Vietnam’s new leader To Lam also went to China on his inaugural trip abroad after becoming CPV general secretary. In June 2024, Hanoi lavishly hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin on his first visit to Vietnam since attending the APEC Summit in Da Nang in 2017.
Adding to the complexity and subtlety of Vietnam’s balancing act, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and President To Lam have always met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy whenever they have attended the same multilateral gathering, whether that was the G-7 meeting in Japan in May 2023, the World Economic Forum in January 2024, or the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024.
The fixing and strengthening of Vietnam’s complex web of partnerships can be considered a great feat in today’s divided world. However, Hanoi’s efforts so far have not qualitatively improved the country’s grand strategic architecture. Its current form – a combination of the strengthened web of partnerships, Vietnam’s “all people’s defense,” ASEAN membership, and the “four no’s” – does not deter aggression, nor does it maximize the country’s defense.
As I have suggested before, Vietnam’s strategic architecture must be augmented and re-arranged “in ways that can deter aggressors and when deterrence is not possible, maximize its defensive response.”
This article expands on the findings of a research paper published in The Pacific Review, an international relations journal covering the interactions of the countries of the Asia-Pacific.