Defense News – 31 January 2022

1. New and core elements of superpower competition Vietnam could face in 2022

(The flags of the United States and China fly from a lamppost in the Chinatown neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., November 1, 2021)

Vietnam needs to handle new challenges thrown up by the intensifying U.S.-China rivalry in the new year, experts have said.

“The most significant new element in the U.S.-China competition in the Indo-Pacific is the tightening of the multipolar system,” Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor, University of New South Wales Canberra at the Australian Defense Force Academy, told VnExpress International.

He explained that in the past, the regional system was “a loose form” of multipolarity and this favored Vietnam’s policy of diversifying and multilateralizing its external relations.

However, the U.S. and its allies have now come closer together, the obvious examples being the AUKUS and to a lesser extent the Quad, and Australia and Japan have strengthened defense relations through the Reciprocal Access Agreement, and China and Russia have moved closer in response, he said.

These developments mean that Vietnam has less room to leverage its relations among the major powers, he said.

In his view, if U.S. – China relations deteriorate and become “cold”, Vietnam will find it more difficult to leverage relations with Beijing and Washington.

For Vietnam, continuing to promote bilateral relations with China and the U.S. and multilateral relations through ASEAN and ASEAN-led regional mechanisms is not sufficient, and one option is to enhance the role of the East Asia Summit as a multilateral security forum, he said.

“Vietnam should give serious consideration to becoming a middle power with the capacity to build coalitions, initiate diplomatic settlement of disputes, and influence the regional security agenda.”

Prof Alexander Vuving of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii, the U.S., noted that the cyber domain is a major new element of great power competition. He predicted that the U.S. and China will intensify their strategic competition in the cyberspace and that this competition will be more consequential than the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The cyber domain provides a “gray zone” for conflict, he said. Cyberattacks and fake news are just some “popular faces” of gray zone conflict. Vietnam must brace itself to all possible “gray zone” attacks, subversions, and manipulations. Two features of “gray zone operations” are deniability and stealth.

“You don’t know who the culprit is; sometimes you don’t even know that you are attacked,” he said.

He pointed to the vulnerability of Vietnam’s connection to the Internet, which is conducted through submarine cables. Relying on only seven cable systems to get to the world-wide web, Vietnam is one of the most vulnerable countries in Asia. In the last years, regarding its connections to the undersea cables, Vietnam has registered on average 10 disruptions a year, each of which lasted for a month.

Gray zone operations will also be a major form of the strategic competition between China and the U.S. since both nuclear-armed powers will try to avoid a direct war between them, which would be hugely disastrous for both, they have to resort to the “gray zone” between war and peace to conduct their competition, Vuving explained.

“War and peace” between the U.S. and China could be “mixed” and may not be clearly separated. “In that context, Vietnam must be ready to cope with new kinds of conflict,” he said.

Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, a research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation in the Philippines, said that in 2022 the competition to develop cutting-edge technologies and set the norms and standards for their use would be a major source of great-power friction.

Vietnam should provide a fast growing alternative destination for foreign capital including in the technology sector, which could help develop advanced manufacturing domestically and secure access to western markets, he said.

But it could also just be a matter of time before Vietnam’s huge exports to the west raise issues of industrial planning, subsidies and support to state-owned enterprises, he pointed out.

Carl Schuster, a visiting professor at Hawaii Pacific University, the U.S., said Vietnam needs to create “new elements” to address “old issues” in the new year.

It could undertake naval exercises with partners “outside the South China Sea” so that China does not see it as “taking sides to provoke tension,” he said.

For instance, it could hold drills with India and other friends in the Indian Ocean, and then China would not have reason to ask Vietnam to stop the exercises and might “reconsider bullying” it, he said.

He suggested that Vietnam should enhance cooperation with claimants in ASEAN to consolidate unity in the association in addressing disputes with China.

U.S. – China rivalry could last till one exhausted

Since war is not the “final arbiter” between the two nuclear-armed states, Vuving argued that the superpower competition could last several decades until one of them is exhausted. This would make the U.S.-China rivalry look similar to the Cold War.

“But what’s most relevant to Vietnam is their difference in terms of the central frontline of the superpower contest.”

During the Cold War, the two superpowers concentrated their rivalry most intensely in Central Europe. Today, the key frontlines of the U.S.-China competition run through the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, the East China Sea and the cyber domain.

Vuving said World War III is unlikely, but local conventional war is possible while “gray zone operations” and “war by other means” will be the “new normal” in the next decades, he predicted. Keeping a fully peaceful environment may be likened to the “zero Covid” strategy.

“What if Vietnam cannot prevent military clashes from happening? It must be prepared for the possibility that peace and stability in the region cannot be maintained.”

Vietnam can shape its international environment by nurturing its resilience, being flexible, and deepening cooperation with those that share its strategic interests, he said.

Thayer said China’s Xi Jinping views the current domestic polarization of politics in the U.S. as likely to intensify in the run-up to the midterm elections in November and hasten the ongoing “decline of American power and influence globally and in the Indo-Pacific Region.”

Xi’s assessment that the U.S is in decline is bolstered by the pace of Chinese military modernization including the construction of more warships, aircraft and missiles and the expansion of their capabilities.

“U.S.-China competition will intensify this year and take the form of an intense action-reaction cycle. In other words, each country will respond to the actions of the other.”

Pitlo said the U.S.’s growing support for Taipei as it loses more diplomatic space would trouble relations between the competing rivals.

Vietnam could benefit from increasing U.S. investments to develop more resilient supply chains free from potential state interference, and from growing security engagement with the U.S. to access arms and training and obtain diplomatic support for its position in the South China Sea and concern about massive dam building in the upper reaches of the Mekong River, he said.

On the other hand, despite maritime disputes and irritants in its relations with China, economic engagement remains important given its market size and production inputs and massive capital, he pointed out.

“Expanding economic ties with the two rivals and other partners like Japan, Europe and its ASEAN neighbors will avoid over-reliance on a single market or investor.”

Schuster said China could look for expanded Belt and Road projects in the region, seeking to tie Vietnam’s economy closer to its own, and so Vietnam should consider expanding trade with Australia and India to diversify options, ensuring no country could gain decisive leverage over its economy.

Collin Koh Swee Lea, a research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said given its geostrategic position and the geopolitical leverage it holds, Vietnam would continue to be courted by both China and the U.S., if not to bring the country into their “camp,” to at least refrain from choosing sides.

This is probably what Vietnam needs to continue doing while maintaining the traditional principles of non-alignment and non-alliances in its foreign policy approach to also ensure strategic flexibility, he said.

He said maintaining the traditional principles means creating more room to maneuver, and this could be done by cultivating closer ties with both fellow ASEAN members and other external powers, he suggested.

Not being positioned in one single geopolitical camp gives Vietnam a great deal of strategic flexibility to pursue its national interests, while minimizing the risk of blowback from any one party, he said.

Beijing could be wary of Vietnam’s growing ties with its rivals such as India, Japan and the U.S., but is unable to fully determine it is firmly in the China-containment camp.

In this regard, Vietnam has calibrated its engagements with these friendly powers very carefully while displaying a level of geopolitical sensitivity toward its immediate neighborly ties, not least China, and not least of course its support for ASEAN centrality, and this principled approach is the way to go, he said.

“While Vietnam may still find itself under pressure at times, maintaining this consistent and principled approach allows the country to continue to exercise agency, and hence safeguard strategic autonomy.”

(By VNExpress.net)

2. Defense diplomacy help enhance Vietnam’s role and position: conference.

(By Nhan Dan Online)

3. Cambodia, Vietnam defense cooperation seen as way to curtail Chinese influence, military expansion.

Cambodia and Vietnam have recommitted to security and defense cooperation, an agreement that experts view as a response to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) growing military presence and influence.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc signed the agreement in late December 2021, vowing to prohibit hostile forces from using their territories to harm the other, according to Voice of America (VOA). The cooperation is an attempt by Vietnam to counter China’s regional expansion. Defense analysts from Vietnam and the United States have accused Cambodia and the PRC of not being transparent about PRC involvement in construction activities at Ream Naval Base, which overlooks the Gulf of Thailand in southern Cambodia. (Pictured: Sailors stand near patrol boats at Ream Naval Base, Cambodia.)

“The government of Cambodia has not been fully transparent about the intent, nature and scope of this project or the role of the PRC military, which raises concerns about intended use of the naval facility,” Chad Roedemeier, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia, told VOA in October 2021, adding that any foreign military presence at Ream would run counter to Cambodia’s constitution and undermine regional security. “The Cambodian people deserve to know more about the project at Ream and to have a say in this type of military agreement, which has long-term implications for their country.”

The U.S. Department of the Treasury in November 2021 sanctioned two Cambodian government officials accused of scheming to profit from construction at Ream. “The United States will not stand by while corrupt officials personally benefit at the expense of the Cambodian people,” Office of Foreign Assets Control Director Andrea M. Gacki said, according to a news release.

Concerns about the PRC’s military presence in Cambodia prompted Vietnam to create a maritime militia unit in June 2021. The unit will coordinate with existing forces to collect information about military activity and to “protect sovereignty over seas and island,” according to VOA.

Vietnam and China have overlapping sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.

“Chinese-funded seaports and an international airport in Sihanoukville and Koh Kong [in Cambodia] have evidently alarmed Hanoi’s foreign policy strategists about Beijing’s military use of this physical infrastructure in a future Sino-Vietnamese armed conflict in the South China Sea,” Kosal Path, a political scientist with the City University of New York, told VOA.

Between August and September 2021 alone, three new buildings went up and new roads were cleared, among other changes, at Ream, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI). Tae Banh, Cambodia’s defense minister, confirmed the PRC was building infrastructure at the naval base but said China’s help came with “no strings attached,” according to an AMTI report. “Since then, China-backed construction has continued to transform the northern half of Ream Naval Base,” according to AMTI.

The December agreement appears to be aimed at preventing the PRC from using its presence in Cambodia to attack Vietnam.

“The two sides agreed to strengthen cooperation in defense and security on the principle of not allowing any hostile forces to use their territory to harm the security of the country,” read a joint statement.

The leaders of Cambodia and Vietnam underscored the importance of respecting independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. They emphasized the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ stance on maintaining peace, security, stability, safety and freedom of navigation and overflight in the East Sea, as the South China Sea is known in Vietnam, and agreed to “promote dialogue and build trust, exercise restraint, comply with international law, settle disputes by peaceful means, in accordance with international law.”

 (By Indo-Pacific Defense Forum)

4. Vietnam’s path forward on COVID-19 and corruption.

COVID-19 broke loose in Vietnam in June 2021, a year after most of East Asia. Until June, countermeasures and aggressive contact tracing had held the pandemic at bay and allowed the economy to keep growing. Perhaps those successes produced a false sense of security. Vietnam had almost no vaccine in inventory, which forced it to implement a draconian lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding provinces while it negotiated urgently for supplies.

By September, doses were plentiful and the regime, spooked by signs that some manufacturing orders were being rerouted away from Vietnam, declared that the nation would ‘live with COVID-19’. Hanoi’s gamble seems to have paid off. After contracting sharply in the third quarter of 2021, the Vietnamese economy revived in the fourth. For the whole year, the nation posted GDP growth of 2.6 per cent and now seems poised to return in 2022 to its accustomed 6 per cent plus annual growth rate.

The year began with the Communist Party of Vietnam’s (CPV) 13th Congress in late January — the ceremonial end to months of intra-party politicking aimed at renewing the leadership and reconfirming party doctrine. In the months before the congress, it became apparent that General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong’s favourite had no chance of winning the CPV Central Committee’s approval.

Rather than yield party leadership to Nguyen Xuan Phuc, then prime minister, Trong manipulated internal rules to effect his own re-election for a third five-year term and install another ‘party faction’ figure, Pham Minh Chinh, as prime minister. Phuc and another ‘government faction’ standout, Vuong Dinh Hue, were relegated to the relatively powerless posts of State President and National Assembly leader.

Trong is now 78 years old and intent on cementing his legacy. Since 2016, he’s made history as a relentless foe of corruption. In 2021, he oversaw the sacking of the Hanoi party chief for forgery and money laundering, prosecutions of individuals linked to the former Ho Chi Minh City party boss and a purge of senior coast guard officers.

Trong also seeks to rid the CPV of ‘self-evolution’ — the idea that the Party might lead Vietnam to more inclusive decision-making and broader participation in government by non-Party-affiliated groups. But he’s running short on time — poor health may force the General Secretary to step down before his term is up in 2026.

The regime continues to cleanse Vietnam’s public space of citizens it perceives as troublemakers. Journalist Pham Doan Trang, sentenced in December to nine years in prison, was one of many convicted in 2021 of ‘conducting propaganda against the state’. In parallel, harsh sentences meted out to farmers accused of mounting an insurrection put land rights activists on notice that resistance to expropriations is futile.

In December, after exposes that made headlines abroad, Facebook vowed to cease enabling regime efforts to suppress online criticism by Vietnamese bloggers. Hanoi has in the past brought foreign social media to heel simply by squeezing their local advertising revenues.

Now that the leaders of the once robust ‘democracy movement’ are in jail or exile, it’s hard to see why the regime doesn’t ease up. Prime Minister Chinh in particular seems to have been stung by criticism of the regime’s record on political liberties. He told reporters several times that human rights in Vietnam are not as imagined in the West. The party-state’s job, he said, is ensuring that the nation’s citizens are comfortable and happy, secure in the knowledge that the nation’s politics are under good management and that none are left behind in times of crisis.

During 2021, Vietnam’s decades-old ‘no foreign alliances’ policy was further stressed by the contentious relationship between China, on one hand, and the United States and its Asian allies on the other. When US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and then Vice President Kamala Harris visited Hanoi in July and August respectively, they urged Vietnam to consider a broad-based ‘strategic partnership’ with the United States. Credible accounts are circulating that Vietnam’s top leadership has reached consensus in principle on upgrading ties with the United States but, worried how China will react, they remain hesitant to formalise an agreement.

Two scandals rang out 2021 in Vietnam. One was merely obscene — cell phone photos showed General To Lam, the Minister of Public Security, being fed bites of a gold foil-wrapped beefsteak at a posh London restaurant.

The second scandal centred on Viet A, a hitherto obscure supplier of medical equipment. The company was revealed to have charged disease control centres in several provinces jaw-droppingly high prices for COVID-19 test kits — something impossible without under-the-table payments and collusion throughout the supply chain. It was the sort of thing that periodically sows doubt in the integrity of Vietnam’s ‘socialist market economy’. As 2022 begins, the CPV’s powerful Anti-Corruption Steering Committee and police units are probing the evidently lucrative involvement of high officials in the Ministry of Health and Science and Technology.

For Vietnam, 2022 looks for the most part like a return to robust export-led growth, unrelenting CPV effort to maintain control of public discourse, and a continued worried eye on US-China tension. General Secretary Trong’s uncertain health is a wild card; close observers of CPV politics say that just in case, Chinh, Phuc and Hue are again canvassing for votes in the party’s central committee.

(By East Asia Forum)

5. Russia’s Vietnam: Why an Invasion of Ukraine Would Be a Disaster for Putin.

New Russian military vehicles including the new Russian T-14 Armata tank, foreground, make their way to Red Square during a rehearsal for the Victory Day military parade, which will take place at Moscow’s Red Square on May 9, 2015, to celebrate 70 years after the victory in World War II in Moscow. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo)

Ukraine is about Putin’s Post-Imperial Hangover, not NATO, Biden’s ‘Weakness,’ and So On

A Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a disaster for Russia. It would obviously also be a disaster for the Ukrainian population, but geopolitically it is hard to see how Russian President Vladimir Putin would escape either the international isolation which would ensue, or win the war itself with manageable costs.

The media’s coverage of Ukraine has missed this; it has been alarmist and hyperbolic. As in the coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal last summer, the media again has rehearsed exhausted neoconservative tropes about U.S. ‘weakness’ and the ‘strength’ of its autocratic opponents who are apparently bent on no less than global domination. The ‘blob’ seems particularly dazzled by Putin’s strength, tactical brilliance, and so on. Just as predictions last summer that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would bring down the world order, this year’s hyperventilating will almost certainly be inaccurate.

NATO Expansion is Not to Blame

One variation on this argument is that had NATO not expanded, Putin would not be pressuring Ukraine and other states around Russia. The Russians read NATO as a threat, and its expansion east is the reason Putin supports gangsters like Alexander Lukashenko, the repressive president of Belarus, or maintains ‘frozen conflicts,’ as in Georgia, along Russia’s perimeter. The story goes that U.S. officials made promises to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that the U.S. would not expand the alliance towards Russia’s borders.

Whether such promises were made and how binding they were given has long been a point of contention, but this entire line of argument misses the real, geopolitical reason NATO expanded – the huge demand for it in Eastern Europe and its massive advance of Western security and values (200 million people and the economies permanently joining the West). The entire Russian argument, for decades, against NATO expansion is premised on the idea that eastern European states do not enjoy full foreign policy autonomy, that they are within a Russian sphere of influence which gives Moscow some measure of veto privilege over their foreign policy choices, such as external alignment. Accepting this line of reasoning is consonant with neither the moral (liberal) values of democratic states, nor in the national interests of the NATO membership.

Ostensibly, an Eastern Europe outside of NATO would have placated Russia, and Putin would behave better. But this counterfactual is unlikely and has become less and less believable over the decades, given Putin’s nationalist-revanchist foreign policy and repressive domestic policy. There is no reason to think that Russia would have allowed Eastern Europe to find its own way democratically. Putin has made it clear that he thinks the Soviet Union’s implosion was terrible. It is at least as plausible that Putin would have tried to bully those unallied eastern European states, as Russia had done in the past. So the argument that expanding NATO was a ‘liberal illusion‘ misses the clear geopolitical value of expanding NATO: Russian revanchism was at least as likely as Russian restraint had NATO not expanded, and integrating Eastern Europe into the West was a huge victory for both Western geopolitical interest and its values.

A Quagmire Awaits

So now Putin has painted himself into a corner. He has built his foreign policy around a confrontation with NATO, but he has neither the domestic strength at home for a sustained foreign military campaign – Russia’s GDP is smaller than South Korea’s and the country’s economy is corrupt and already under sanction – nor a small, pliant target, like Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine today.

If Putin partially invades Ukraine – through a mix of military force, support for militias, subversion and so on – the war will likely degenerate into a quagmire like Iraq or Vietnam. Ukraine would indeed lose any direct battlefield contests with the Russian army, but Ukraine’s large, nationalist population is almost certain to widely resist the incursion through asymmetric and guerilla action, pinning down the Russian military in a ‘forever war’ semi-occupation from which it could not withdraw without losing. The war would further Russia’s isolation from the world economy because of the dramatically stepped-up sanctions sure to follow. Moscow will become more dependent on China, and most of Europe will turn enough more sharply against Putin. Pressure to find alternatives to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will rise significantly. Eastern European countries will increase their defense spending. U.S. troops may be stationed further east in NATO.

Alternatively, if Putin tried to avoid a quagmire by actually conquering the whole of Ukraine and absorbing it in a full-scale war, Russia would be isolated from the Western economy for a generation. It would be expelled from the SWIFT inter-bank exchange system and the political support for Nord Stream 2 would disappear. NATO defense spending would explode. Even China might not back away if Russia got pulled into a major offensive war of its own choosing, complete with mass civilian casualties. The risk of outright conflict with NATO would rise.

Biden is Wise to Wait

U.S. power is based in America’s large, dynamic economy and its skilled, power-projectable military, complemented by its many alliance relationships around the world. Were Putin to invade Ukraine, none of that would change. In fact, U.S. alliances would likely tighten as states drifted away from Russia in fear. Whether the U.S. should help Ukraine and how much is a tough policy question, but Putin’s dilemma is far worse than alarmist, threat-inflating U.S. media coverage suggests. This is probably why Putin, for all his braggadocio, has not attacked. He is looking for an exit.

(THE-END)