On November 5, former U.S. President Donald Trump was re-elected for a rare non-consecutive second term. Unlike eight years ago, most world leaders quickly responded positively to Trump’s sweeping election victory. They were prepared for his return, even though there is considerable anxiety among Washington’s closest allies and partners about Trump’s transactional leadership style and inconsistent approach to foreign policy.
Top Vietnamese leaders followed their international peers in congratulating Trump on his election victory, expressing hope that Vietnam-U.S. relations will continue to develop as during his first term in office. Indeed, there are solid grounds for optimism for continued improvements in the bilateral relationship after Trump returns to the White House.
At the beginning of this first term, Vietnam was proactive in promoting relations with the Trump administration. Many U.S. allies and partners in the region were probably envious when Vietnam’s then-Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc became the first ASEAN leader to be welcomed by Trump to the White House. The subsequent four years saw Vietnam-U.S. relations develop positively across the board, laying the groundwork for last year’s historic establishment of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Trump himself also offered kind words to Vietnam, describing the nation’s people as “friends” and praising the country’s economic development.
Since the two countries normalized relations nearly 30 years ago, Trump has been the only U.S. president to visit Vietnam twice while in office and also, the first president to visit Vietnam in his first year in office.
Trump’s first state visit to Vietnam took place in 2017, when he attended the APEC Summit in Danang, and then flew on to Hanoi, where he held talks with all of Vietnam’s highest-ranking leaders. During his trip to Vietnam, and on the wider Asian tour of which it was part, Trump spoke for the first time about his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, an upgraded version of President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy, which identified the region as the primary arena of strategic competition with rival powers such as China and Russia. This strategy has now been embedded in U.S. foreign policy and continued to be implemented and expanded by the Biden administration. Given its location at the heart of the Indo-Pacific, Vietnam has been consistently identified as playing an important position in the Indo-Pacific strategies pursued by both the first Trump and Biden administrations.
Trump’s second visit to Vietnam took place in February 2019, when he attended a second summit in Hanoi with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. While in Hanoi, he invited the then General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong to visit the U.S. ahead of the 25th anniversary of the normalization of Vietnam-U.S. relations in 2020. If Trong hadn’t unexpectedly suffered a minor stroke in mid-2019 and had to cancel the visit, Trump might have become the second U.S. president, after Obama in 2015, to host Trong at the White House.
Other senior officials to visit Vietnam during the first Trump administration include secretaries of state Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, secretaries of defense Mark Esper and James Mattis, and National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.
While on the campaign trail, Trump criticized Vietnam for not managing its trade surplus with the U.S., he later toned down his critiques when commercial agreements worth billions of dollars were signed between the two countries under his watch. Vietnam also risked sturdy actions from the first Trump administration, including probes into Vietnam’s currency valuation and timber practices. It was put on the list of currency manipulators at the end of the first Trump administration, but was then removed from the list by the Biden administration.
Bilateral cooperation in security and defense also saw strong development under Trump. Two U.S. aircraft carriers, the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Theodore Roosevelt, visited the country, in 2018 and 2020, respectively, marking a remarkable step forward in strategic trust and defense relations between the two former enemies. A third aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, also paid a port call in Danang last year. Under Trump, the two countries also signed agreements on defense cooperation and promoted security cooperation and intelligence sharing.
Trust between Vietnam and the U.S. was further increased when Vietnam immediately sent 450,000 protective suits and facial masks to the U.S. at the Trump administration’s request, during the initial stage of its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The then-U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, Daniel Kritenbrink, who is currently the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said of Vietnam’s aid, “a friend in need is a friend indeed.” Kritenbrink went further, stating that “the sky is the limit for the U.S.-Vietnam partnership”, implicitly referring to the strategic trust between the two countries.
Trump’s election victory has prompted concerns about the possible effects on Vietnam’s exports to the U.S. given that he has publicly threatened to impose tariffs of 10-20 percent on all imports to the U.S. However, experts say the likelihood of actually implementing these tariffs is very low. Trump will definitely press Vietnam to continue doing more to address the trade imbalances, as he did in the past, but will not take tough measures against the country. The state of Vietnam-U.S. relations is not as cloudy as some observers have predicted.
In fact, a business-minded Trump is unlikely to bypass any business opportunities that arise in Vietnam’s increasingly lucrative market. Recently, the Trump Organization signed an agreement with a Vietnamese company to develop a $1.5 billion entertainment and leisure resort outside Hanoi. Furthermore, the Trump administration may take advantage of Vietnam’s declining arms purchases from Russia to strike weapons deals of its own, as a way to bring down the trade surplus.
The fact that Trump’s personality is so unpredictable complicates any prediction of how Vietnam-U.S. relations will fare over the next four years. However, in a phone call with the new CPV General Secretary To Lam on November 11, Trump expressed his confidence that the bilateral relationship will continue to grow. He also accepted Lam’s invitation to visit Vietnam, cultivating a hope that he will touch down in the country sometime in 2025, when Hanoi and Washington will celebrate the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations normalization.