By making a rare second trip this year to Vietnam, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis is signaling how intensively US President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to counter China’s military assertiveness by cozying up to smaller nations in the region that share the US’ wariness about Chinese intentions.
The visit, beginning today, also shows how far US-Vietnamese relations have advanced since the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War.
Mattis visited Hanoi in January. Three months after his visit, a US Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, made a port call at Da Nang.
It was the first such visit since the war and a reminder to China that the US is intent on strengthening partnerships in the region as a counterweight to China’s growing military might.
The most vivid expression of Chinese assertiveness is its transformation of contested islets and other features in the South China Sea into strategic military outposts.
The Trump administration has sharply criticized China for deploying surface-to-air missiles and other weapons on some of the outposts.
Mattis in June said the placement of these weapons is “tied directly to military use for the purposes of intimidation and coercion.”
This time Mattis is visiting Ho Chi Minh City. He also plans to visit a Vietnamese air base, Bien Hoa, a major air station for US forces during the war and meet Vietnamese Minister of National Defense Ngo Xuan Lich.
Although Vietnam has become a common destination for US secretaries of defense, two visits in one year is unusual and Ho Chi Minh City is rarely on the itinerary.
The last Pentagon chief to visit Ho Chi Minh City was William Cohen in 2000; he was the first US secretary of defense to visit Vietnam since the war. Formal diplomatic relations were restored in 1995 and the US lifted its war-era arms embargo in 2016.
The Mattis trip originally was to include a visit to Beijing, but that stop was canceled amid rising tensions over trade and defense issues.
China recently rejected a request for a Hong Kong port visit by a US warship and last summer Mattis disinvited China from a major maritime exercise in the Pacific.
China last month scrapped a Pentagon visit by its navy chief and demanded that Washington cancel an arms sale to Taiwan.
These tensions have served to accentuate the potential for a stronger US partnership with Vietnam.
Josh Kurlantzick, a senior fellow and Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview that Vietnam in recent years has shifted from a foreign and defense policy that carefully balanced relations with China and the US to one that shades in the direction of Washington.
“I do see Vietnam very much aligned with some of Trump’s policies,” he said, referring to what the administration calls its “free and open Indo-Pacific strategy.”
“Vietnam, leaving aside Singapore, is the country the most skeptical of China’s Southeast Asia policy and makes the most natural partner for the US,” Kurlantzick said.
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