France’s President Emmanuel Macron yesterday wound up a three-day visit to Vietnam, in which he signed a raft of cooperation agreements including a major deal for the sale of 20 Airbus aircraft, and said that his nation offered a “third way” for Hanoi amid intensifying U.S.-China competition.
During his visit to Hanoi, the first stop in a regional tour that will also take him to Indonesia and Singapore later this week, Macron visited a memorial to the anti-French insurgency of the 1940s and 1950s and visited the 11th century Temple of Literature. He also met with President Luong Cuong, To Lam, the head of the Communist Party of Vietnam, and Tran Thanh Man, the chair of the National Assembly – the three senior-most Vietnamese officials currently in the country. (Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh was busy representing Vietnam at the 46th ASEAN Summit in Malaysia.)
According to a Vietnamese state media report, Macron and Cuong “together witnessed the handover of 14 cooperation documents between the two countries.” (Other reports put the number of agreements at “more than 30.”) According to Reuters, these deals covered “cooperation on nuclear energy, defense, rail and maritime transport, Airbus earth-observation satellites, and Sanofi vaccines.” The most notable of the agreements was a 7 million euro ($7.9 billion) deal for Vietnam’s low-cost airline VietJet to buy 20 330-900 wide-body aircraft from the European manufacturer Airbus.
“It is truly a new page being written between our two countries … a desire to write an even more ambitious page of the relationship between Vietnam and France, between ASEAN and the European Union,” Macron said in a joint press conference with Cuong.
Marcron’s visit, the first by a French president in almost a decade, was almost overshadowed by the an incident in which his wife Brigitte pushed him in the face as the couple prepared to disembark from their aircraft in Hanoi. But it reflected the concerted French push to deepen its relationship with its former colony. Last October, Hanoi and Paris announced the establishment of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the highest level in Vietnam’s diplomatic hierarchy, pledging a broad expansion of economic and security relations.
France is one of nine nations with which Vietnam has established Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships since late 2022, in an effort to strengthen its key bilateral partnerships and avoid entanglement in the growing Sino-American competition.
During a joint press conference yesterday with Cuong, Macron stressed the importance of a rules-based order “at a time of both great imbalance and a return to power-driven rhetoric.” He added that the two nations’ “sovereignty partnership” could be the central axis of the Indo-Pacific strategy that Paris published in 2019.
This was motivated by China’s growing economic and military power, and a desire to protect France’s fundamental interests in the region. These include the 1.65 million French citizens living in French territories in the Pacific and Indian oceans, and the vast exclusive economic zone that surrounds them. French officials have also expressed a desire to safeguard freedom of navigation and access to the global commons, issues that have been challenged by Beijing’s expansive claims over the South and East China seas.
Following the meeting, the Vietnamese and French governments released a joint statement that recapitulated much of the language that attended the establishment of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership last year. According to the statement, France and Vietnam “reaffirmed the willingness to deepen their countries’ partnership of trust to strengthen their independence, self-reliance, and development.” They “reaffirmed the essential role of multilateralism” and the importance of “peace, security, and stability” in the South China Sea. Paris and Hanoi also undertook to “promote an international trade environment conducive to common prosperity.”
The latter was a veiled reference to the global economic uncertainty stemming from the United States’ protectionist tariff policy, which provided the gloomy backdrop to the meeting, as well as to the concurrent ASEAN meetings in Kuala Lumpur.
President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement on April 2 has presented both Vietnam and France with considerable economic challenges. Vietnam faces a 46 percent tariff that will enter into effect in July, threatening the viability of its export-led economic development model. Vietnamese negotiators are currently in talks with the U.S. government, and have already offered to make a number of concessions, including promises to purchase more American goods, slash tariffs on certain U.S. imports, and crack down on the illicit transshipment of Chinese goods via its territory, in a bid to avoid the full tariff.
The European Union has also come into Trump’s crosshairs. On May 23, the U.S. president announced the imposition of a 50 percent duties on European Union goods from June 1, although in characteristic fashion he subsequently delayed the imposition of the duty until June 9.
In an address to Vietnamese students at Hanoi’s University of Science and Technology, Macron referenced the Trump administration’s tariffs saying that the U.S. leader was “imposing tariffs according to the side of the bed on which he woke up,” before presenting France as a reliable alternative and a “third way” between the U.S. and China.