South-East Asia is not short of leaders with considerable legacies, however varied their records may have been in other respects. Indonesia’s General Suharto managed to reduce inflation from 630 per cent in 1966 to under nine percent by 1972. Malaysia’s Dr Mahathir will always be remembered for the massive infrastructure projects undertaken in his first two decades in office, ending in 2003, including most famously Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew turned a resource-poor island into a modern, advanced city-state. Vietnam’s Nguyen Phu Trong, who died last week aged 80, deserves to be counted among them.
To explain why, consider this: in September of last year, Vietnam hosted US President Joe Biden, a visit during which ties between the two countries were elevated to a comprehensive strategic partnership. The visit was so successful that on Mr Trong’s death, Mr Biden issued a statement of high praise. “The people of Vietnam and the United States – and people across the Indo-Pacific region – enjoy greater security and opportunity today because of the friendship between our two countries. That is thanks to him,” wrote Mr Biden.
Just three months after Mr Biden, China’s President Xi Jinping was in Hanoi. This also went so well that Mr Xi said it marked a “new historic milestone” in bilateral relations. The two countries announced the establishment of a strategic China-Vietnam “community of shared future” and signed 36 co-operation agreements.
Vietnam was the only country to receive state visits from the two men last year. What makes it all the more remarkable is the fact that it was at war with both the US and China within living memory (US troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, while the brief Sino-Vietnam war was in 1979). Then last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin was received warmly in the Vietnamese capital, praising “constructive” talks and signing 11 memorandums of co-operation, including over oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea.
To have such good relations with the US, China and Russia is no mean feat, and it does not come about by chance. This is Mr Trong’s legacy that deserves such praise: his concept of “bamboo diplomacy”. This is a foreign policy comparable to the "strong roots, stout trunk, and flexible branches" of the bamboo plant, as he put it in 2021, and which has led the world’s greatest powers to court the country, while allowing Vietnam to upgrade its connections with all its suitors.
Not all the credit can go to Mr Trong, who was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam from 2011 to his death last week. Ties with Russia go back a long way. The Soviet Union was one of the first countries to recognise Communist-led North Vietnam in 1950, when the French were trying to retake what had been one of their colonies, and Russia today is still the chief supplier of weaponry to the country.
But the paths to friendship with China and the US were not certain. Vietnam and the US normalised diplomatic relations in 1995, and two years later Hanoi agreed to settle a historical debt that allowed trade to resume between the two countries. The US is now Vietnam’s biggest export market and it is America’s tenth largest trading partner. But it is still a Communist state with a different view on all kinds of freedoms, compared to the US. Mr Trong’s 2015 visit – the first ever by a Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary to the United States – surely had an effect on consolidating what then US president Barack Obama called a “constructive relationship that is based on mutual respect and that has benefited the people of both countries”.
Given they share a border, it is no surprise that Vietnam and China have a very deep history, which over hundreds of years included wars and Chinese occupation. More recently, the two countries differed violently over the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s, and territorial disputes in the South China Sea caused a wave of anti-China protests in Vietnam in 2014.
But as a recent analysis in The Diplomat put it, Mr Trong’s signature foreign policy has had the “ability to turn a zero-sum game among the great powers into a positive-sum game for Vietnam … From the Chinese perspective, Trong’s bamboo diplomacy is an assurance that Hanoi will not ally with an extra-regional power at China’s expense so long as China exercises restraint towards Vietnam”. Another researcher wasn’t quite so positive: “Vietnam remains somewhere between a frontline state in the Indo-Pacific for the US and a well-behaved comrade for China.”
Yet however one puts it, Vietnam is in a position many countries would envy. China almost certainly sees reassurance in the fact that the two countries’ political systems resemble each other more than they do any others in the world. In the long run, I believe American and other investors will also approve of the austere Mr Trong’s “blazing furnace” anti-corruption drive that led to the dismissal of two top leaders in the last few months. Its economy has been regarded as an emerging market standout for years, if not decades, and it is well placed as a low-cost manufacturing base with a very competitive workforce.
There are other countries in the region that maintain good relations with China and the US – indeed, most of them are anxious to do so. What makes Vietnam exceptional is that it has had such a troubled history with both, and yet, going by last year’s state visits, it also now has the very best friendship with both, and not just in South-East Asia.
The country’s leaders don’t tend to make a big mark on the global stage, nor are they generally big “characters”, as some in the region have been. But the results of Mr Trong’s “bamboo diplomacy” must be the envy of every foreign ministry in the Asia Pacific. He deserves to be honoured and remembered for his astonishing success in forging a future many others would like to emulate.
