Nothing personal: a lesson for Trump in Vietnamese politics
Personality counts for little in Hanoi’s political circles – if the US president shows he is a friend who values and respects the nation, he may get an enthusiastic welcome when he visits in November
The meeting between Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Donald Trump was highly anticipated by many Asia watchers. How would the new president get along with the Vietnamese leader? Would there be an off-script moment or blowout? For Vietnam, personality politics mattered less than trade and strategy.
In Asia, personal ties matter to business and government. You may not have to bribe an official to gain cooperation but you may at least have to drink with him.
Yet internationally this matters less. By all reports Phuc and Trump got along, but the two men could not be more different. Just before he headed to Washington for his first trip there as Prime Minister (and as the first Association of Southeast Asian Nations – Asean – leader to visit Washington) Phuc gave a filmed interview to Bloomberg’s Haslinda Amin in his office. Vietnamese leaders rarely give sit-down interviews to foreign journalists.
He was careful to state his plans for the visit, which were a series of well thought out talking points to take to the new president to argue for the importance of the US-Vietnam relationship, and its multiple mutually beneficial areas, which even included the US$32 billion trade surplus Vietnam enjoys.
Phuc has the didact’s tendency of many Vietnamese leaders, to go into many details. He did not just champion freedom of navigation in the South China Sea but said it was important that “the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 is observed”. The full name, and year. Can anyone imagine Trump doing the same? Given Trump has always believed in good personal ties, what middle ground might the men have found in their 30 minute meeting on Wednesday? It didn’t matter in the end: Vietnam bought US$8 billion worth of stuff, including jet engines and agricultural goods, which made the president happy.
Is Trump about to turn America’s back on Asia?
