The geopolitical map is being radically redrawn as the Ukraine war enters its third month.
The United States and its Western allies seem on track for long-term isolation of the Kremlin. NATO is ramping up its readiness posture and will likely soon have two new members in the form of Finland and Sweden. And there’s no doubt that President Joe Biden’s overdue National Security Strategy will feature Moscow much more than originally planned.
But standing up to Russian President Vladimir Putin is only one part of the big picture for the West. Another crucial piece is countering China’s increasingly concerning global influence. Southeast Asian countries are important American partners in that. Some of them, such as Vietnam, are more valuable than you might think.
Vietnam is often thought of as being just like China, a communist regime trying to pursue capitalist prosperity without democratization. But lesser-known signals from Hanoi in recent years suggest that Uncle Sam’s former foe is becoming more open to liberal and democratic values than Beijing is.
Vietnam’s National Assembly held an election last year in which virtually the country’s entire adult population of 70 million was mandated to vote. Their ballots filled the 500-seat legislative body with a selection of 868 candidates who had been vetted by the ruling Communist Party. The National People’s Congress of China rarely has more candidates than seats in its elections, and ordinary Chinese people do not get to vote on any of them. Only lower-level legislatures, which are themselves handpicked by the party, are part of the pyramid voting scheme. Surely, the party always prevails in both countries. But competition, even if just a tad, helps with the checks and balances.
The importance of electoral competition, or the lack thereof, is apparent in Hong Kong, which will hold an election in May to choose its next leader. But the future is already written: On April 6, Hong Kong’s former security chief, John Lee, became the only candidate acceptable to Beijing. Ten days later, he became the only candidate eligible to run. Therefore, he’ll be the only candidate able to win, and his crowning will mark the first time since Hong Kong’s handover that the election of its top post has only one candidate. Those who think Vietnamese and Chinese elections are all the same should try to convince Hong Kongers that they are just as free as they used to be.
Overlooking the promising developments in Hanoi may cost Washington an important partner in advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific. China’s new friends in the Solomon Islands can attest to how diligent Beijing has been at building its own alliances in the Pacific Islands region. Meanwhile, India’s reluctance to get tough on the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine should be a wake-up call for Western countries that don’t think much about alliance-building until crises come.
Biden is set to host a summit next month with leaders of Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam included. Washington would be remiss not to consider bringing relations with Hanoi to the next level.
Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.
