Vietnam yearns for closer US ties

Pham Binh Minh, whose father fought to force the United States out of Vietnam, is working fervently to elevate the interest and involvement of his country's former enemy.

Vietnam wants a US presence for economic reasons and as a balance to China, the regional superpower. Minh is the new foreign minister; his father was part of Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime during the bitter conflict of the 1960s and 1970s; later, he was foreign minister when Vietnam clashed with China.

Economic ties between the nations are growing; the United States is the largest importer of Vietnamese goods. There are regular military contacts, and this month the two countries signed the first defence pact regarding military medicine.

None of this, the top Vietnamese diplomat insists, is intended to counter China. Still, talk of multilateralism and encouraging the US role in the stability of the region isn't appreciated by the Beijing regime.

Common interests aside, the relationship with the United States is complicated. Vietnam isn't sure America is committed to Asia for the long run, and officials privately complain that the region is a low priority for Washington.

Minh says he'd like "more consistency" in US policy, which should "pay more attention" to Southeast Asia. More troubling is the continuing friction over Vietnam's human and political rights policies.

The record is better than China's. The realpolitik, however, is that with about 90 million people, the world's 14th-largest population, and a gross domestic product of $102 billion (Dh374.6 billion), Vietnam is treated differently from the colossus China.

Deeper alliances

Yet US policymakers, who worry about the aggressiveness of an increasingly confident China, want deeper alliances with Vietnam.

They look to a younger generation epitomised by Minh, who remembers that as a teenager he would dash "to the shelters when the bombs were dropped." As an adult, he received a graduate degree at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and spent several years at the United Nations in New York and at the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.

The depth of the association in the years ahead depends on the evolution of Vietnam's economic, legal and political system. There have been striking gains since the Communists opened the system to private enterprise more than two decades ago.

Per capita income is about $1,200, almost 10 times more than a quarter century ago; the country has fully joined the global economic community. American foreign investment is $10 billion, small but growing rapidly. Companies such as Intel and Chevron are making major investments.

Cheap labour

The economy, however, is still driven largely by cheap labour. The Communist Party bureaucracy stifles the entrepreneurial spirit. Corruption is rampant. Though he claims that it's a "top priority," of the regime, Minh admits that reducing corruption "is hard."

Paradoxes persist: internet use per capita is among the highest in the region and the illiteracy rate is relatively low; yet the educational system is inferior. One of the few jewels is the small Ho Chi Minh City-based public-policy centre affiliated with Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

A few years ago, the centre published a study on the challenges facing Vietnam. It concluded that the hallmarks of the successful East Asian economies of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan — transparency, little corruption, first-class health and education systems and a viable legal structure — all are lacking in Vietnam.

"Countries that compete on the basis of cheap labour cannot, by definition, move beyond lower-income status," it said.

Younger leaders such as the foreign minister face daunting challenges. Among the biggest: walking the delicate line between maintaining decent relations with the superpower next door and strengthening ties with Washington; and dramatically curbing corruption and reforming an educational system the Harvard study described as abysmal.

That raises an interesting possibility, one the foreign minister says he would welcome: Harvard, the institution that produced many of the architects of the ill-fated Vietnam War, could take the lead in creating a first-class Vietnamese university.