Vietnam - US Relationship Has Grown Beyond All Expectations

 

Celebrating the 15th anniversary of relations with Vietnam this year has been a unique opportunity to look back over the past 15 years and evaluate how far our relations have come and what we can accomplish together.

 

Vietnam's ASEAN chairmanship was extremely successful, and not just in terms of protocol. Vietnam did much to further ASEAN's agenda, both internally and in its relationship with the rest of the world – the United States especially. Highlights of the year include President Nguyen Minh Triet's visit to New York to serve as co-chair of the US-ASEAN Summit, Secretary of State Clinton's two visits, and the visit of Defence Secretary Gates.

 

We appreciate in particular Vietnam's role in facilitating the invitation for the United States and Russia to join the East Asia Summit and the decision to inaugurate the ADMM Plus which, for the first time, brought together ASEAN defence ministers with counterparts from eight other countries, including the United States.  

 

We are cooperating on a broad range of regional and international issues, as demonstrated by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s April visit to the US to take part in President Obama's Nuclear Security Summit.

 

And our bilateral relationship is deepening as well. Both Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates’ visits, for example, included meetings with top Vietnamese officials, including the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Defence Minister, and also involved meetings with Vietnamese students and civil society representatives.

As Secretary Clinton said when she was in Vietnam earlier in the year, bilateral relations between the United States and Vietnam have grown beyond what anyone could have imagined 15 years ago. The US – Vietnam relationship continues to grow, based on friendship, mutual respect, and cooperation on a wide range of issues and in the long-term interests of both countries.

 

The development of our relationship is clear in the expansion of trade and investment. Bilateral trade had grown from only US$451 million 15 years ago to US$15.4 billion in 2009, and our trade is on track to exceed that in 2010. The United States is Vietnam’s largest single export market, and US exports to Vietnam have also been growing as we provide important inputs to Vietnam’s developing industries, as well as goods valued by Vietnamese in their daily lives.

 

The US was the single largest investor in Vietnam in 2009 and US investors remain interested. US investment is bringing valuable technology to help Vietnam move toward higher-value manufacturing and plays a key part in developing Vietnam’s human resource base.    

 

Our economic partnership is growing in other ways. For example, in 2008 our two countries negotiated and have since implemented a cargo open skies agreement, and we look forward to concluding a full open skies agreement with Vietnam in the future. 

When he was in Yokohama for the 2010 APEC Leaders meeting, President Triet announced that Vietnam will join negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership regional free trade agreement as a full member.

 

Over the course of next year, the United States, Vietnam and other partner countries will be working together to negotiate the TPP as a high-standard agreement that addresses new and emerging trade issues and 21^st-century challenges, such as promoting connectivity and helping small and medium sized enterprises. This will further strengthen the US – Vietnam economic relationship and Vietnam’s competitive position in the region and the world.

 

We will continue to work with Vietnam to implement our bilateral and WTO trade commitments to ensure that we both take utmost advantage of these agreements and other opportunities. 

 

Vietnam has all the potential of becoming one of the leading US partners in the region. I foresee a continuing collaborative role for the United States. I also predict that we will remain Vietnam’s most important export market and that our process of bilateral economic integration will continue and strengthen in the years to come. 

In our experience, the private sector is the genesis of innovation and creativity that creates sustainable long term growth. A better climate for doing business in Vietnam will encourage the expansion of the private sector. The Government of Vietnam continues to work to improve the investment climate in Vietnam. One important effort has been the Prime Minister’s Project 30, which has identified a broad range of reforms to improve the business environment, for both domestic and foreign companies. In recognition of Vietnam’s efforts, Vietnam moved up 10 spots to number 78 out of 183 economies surveyed in the World Bank Doing Business Survey.

 

We have been helping to support those efforts through the USAID-supported STAR (Support for Trade Acceleration) and VNCI (Vietnam Competitiveness Initiative) projects, which have provided expertise to help the government shape legal and regulatory economic reform, and reduce administrative burdens on doing business. 

 

There is more to be done, however. We continue to encourage the government to make the legal and economic changes necessary to reform its state-owned enterprise sector, ensuring a level playing field for all sectors of the economy – state-owned, private and foreign-invested.   The United States would like to work further with Vietnam on governance reform and greater accountability. One thing I have learned is that Vietnam is full of creative, entrepreneurial people. To encourage innovation, improvements in Vietnam’s educational system, particularly at the tertiary level, will be critical to providing the skilled workers for Vietnam’s growing economy, along with better enforcement of intellectual property rights protection in Vietnam.