The symbolic visit of United States President Joe Biden to Vietnam this Monday produced a joint statement against "threats or the use of force" in the South China Sea. An evident sign that suspicion of Beijing's regional hegemony is the strongest wicker in the surprising reconciliation between Washington and Hanoi, enemies at war just fifty years ago.
Biden has held meetings this Monday, separately, with the president, the prime minister and the speaker of the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Late yesterday she did it with the real strong man of the country, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyen Phu Trọng
The official visit, of just 24 hours, after the closing of the G-20 summit in New Delhi, has covered other meetings of a marked economic nature. Boeing, for example, has signed the sale of fifty aircraft, for 7.2 billion dollars, to Vietnam Airlines.
Likewise, executives from American multinationals, mainly technological ones such as Google or Intel, are maintaining contacts at the highest level, in their desire to continue displacing part of their production in China and strengthening contacts with some of the flagship firms of the flourishing Vietnamese economy. , such as the electric car manufacturer VinFast.
Joe Biden has described his visit as "historic", in which Hanoi has officially elevated its relations with the former enemy to the same level as those it maintains with China, Russia, India and South Korea. In any case, beyond the symbolism, Washington cannot overshadow Vietnam's economic relationship with China or its defense relationship with Russia.
However, Washington has stressed its interest in "the development of Vietnam's autonomous defense capabilities," which overwhelmingly depends on its Russian arsenal. Just a few months ago, an American aircraft carrier docked again in a Vietnamese port.
Washington and Hanoi established relations in 1995, with Bill Clinton. In 2013, with Biden as Barak Obama's vice president, these relations took a leap forward, almost immediately after the rise to power of Xi Jinping, which has hardened Beijing's territorial claims over practically the entire South China Sea, provoking the other coastal countries, such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as the Taipei administration.
All of them unilaterally and militarily control different islets, mainly the Paracelsus and Spratly archipelagos, despite a tangle of crossed territorial claims.
By the time the United States withdrew from Vietnam - where it replaced France - the war had claimed the lives of nearly three million Vietnamese on both sides -most of them civilians- and nearly sixty thousand Americans -almost all soldiers- in addition to hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and tens of thousands of Laotians.
Unlike what happens in countries that have suffered much less from American interventionism, in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam there is no popular animosity toward the Americans, defeated on the battlefield. The rapprochement does not occur behind the backs of the population.
Something that could take time in the case of Afghanistan, where an unusual and pioneering business mission of the United States Chamber of Commerce to the Kabul of the Taliban was recorded anyway last week.
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The Vietnam War deeply marked the generation of Joe Biden, who wanted to get closer to the place where his friend John McCain, a deceased senator, jumped by parachute and was taken prisoner after bombing the capital of North Vietnam.
During his visit, Biden dropped that he finally had a meeting at the G-20 in New Delhi with the Chinese Prime Minister, Li Qiang, who was replacing President Xi Jinping. This would confirm the highest level meeting between both superpowers in almost ten months. "It was not tense at all," the White House leader reportedly replied, rejecting the increasingly frequent comparisons with the Cold War. "We talk about stability, because we want our relationship with China to go up."
It should be said that Joe Biden is not the only president who has taken advantage of the New Delhi meeting to continue the trip to the East. Frenchman Emmanuel Macron announced today from Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, the acquisition of 10 Airbus aircraft by the local airline Biman, for a price that could be close to three billion euros. Her host, Bengali President Sheikh Hasina, will have to face the polls again in January and her recent presence at the G-20 summit, as a special guest of the Indian presidency, has been a boost.
