The administration of US President Joe Biden is in talks with Vietnam over an agreement for the largest arms transfer in history between the ex-Cold War adversaries, said two people familiar with a deal that could irk China and sideline Russia.
A package, which could come together within the next year, could consummate the newly upgraded partnership between Washington and Hanoi with the sale of a fleet of US F-16 jets as the Southeast Asian nation faces tensions with Beijing in the disputed South China Sea, one of the people said.
The deal is still in its early stages, with exact terms yet to be worked out, and might not come together, but it was a key topic of Vietnamese-US official talks in Hanoi, New York and Washington over the past month.
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The US is considering structuring special financing terms for the pricey equipment that could help cash-strapped Hanoi steer away from its traditional reliance on lower-cost, Russian-made arms, said the other source, who declined to be named.
Spokespersons for the White House and the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.
“We have a very productive and promising security relationship with the Vietnamese and we do see interesting movement from them in some US systems, in particular anything that can help them better monitor their maritime domain, perhaps transport aircraft and some other platforms,” a US official said.
“Part of what we’re working on internally as the US government is being creative about how we could try to provide better financing options to Vietnam to get them things that might be really useful to them,” they said.
A major US-Vietnam arms deal could aggravate China, Vietnam’s larger neighbor, which is wary of Western efforts to box in Beijing.
A long-simmering territorial dispute between Vietnam and China is heating up in the South China Sea and explains why Vietnam is looking to build up maritime defenses.
“They are developing asymmetric defensive capabilities, but [want] to do so without triggering a response from China,” said Jeffrey Ordaniel, associate professor of international security studies at Tokyo International University and director for maritime security at think tank Pacific Forum International. “It is a delicate balancing act.”
Ordaniel said that Washington should shift funds set aside for financing militaries in the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific region “so partners like Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan can afford the weapons they need to resist Beijing.”
The Biden administration has said it is trying to balance geopolitical competition with China, including in the Pacific and responsibly managing the two superpowers’ relationship.
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