By Steve Holland and Simon Lewis
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden met Vietnamese President To Lam on Wednesday for talks aimed at deepening relations with the Southeast Asian manufacturing hub and countering its ties with China and Russia.
Biden and Lam, the ruling Communist Party leader making her first visit to the United States as president, met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. A senior U.S. official said they discussed how to accelerate a strategic partnership agreed last year.
Meeting Biden on Wednesday, Lam praised what she called Biden’s historic contribution to improving bilateral relations.
Biden said that since a new era in relations began last year, the two countries had made significant investments in semiconductors and supply chains and launched unprecedented cooperation in cybersecurity.
He also said they were united in their commitments to freedom of navigation and the rule of law, referring to regional maritime disputes with China.
Vietnam News Agency reported that Lam told Biden that Vietnam was on the verge of a new era of development and that he was a reliable friend and partner.
“Vietnam will continue to firmly pursue its foreign policy of independence, self-reliance, multilateralism and diversification,” Lam told Biden, the state media agency reported. Lam met this week in New York with representatives of U.S. companies, including Meta (NASDAQ:), who pledged to expand investments in the communist-ruled country with a population of 100 million.
Lam called on business leaders to back Hanoi’s proposal that Washington remove Vietnam from the list of non-market economies and lift other trade restrictions and that the United States and Vietnam cooperate on semiconductor supply chains.
Biden visited Hanoi a year ago and secured deals on semiconductors and minerals and an improvement in diplomatic relations, despite U.S. concerns about human rights issues.
U.S. Rep. Michelle Steel, a California Republican who represents a large Vietnamese American population, wrote to Biden ahead of the meeting asking him to directly address human rights abuses in Vietnam under Lam’s leadership.
Asked whether Vietnam’s NME status was discussed, the senior US official told reporters: “They talked about economic cooperation in general and plans to step up cooperation with Vietnam.”
Asked whether they discussed China, the official said: “The leaders acknowledged the fact that Vietnam lives in a complicated neighborhood.”
He said there was a recognition that Hanoi “has to be very cautious and strategic in its approach to the region” and that the United States is a strategic partner.
Alexander Vuving, a Vietnam expert at the Hawaii-based Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, said the meeting was important to help Lam consolidate power after being confirmed as Vietnam’s top leader in August.
He said this is a sign of Vietnam’s balanced position among major powers, given Lam’s recent visit to China and meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as the importance of Hanoi’s relationship in US policy toward Asia.
Lam spoke at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and her travels include a stop in Cuba, Vietnam’s longtime communist partner.
Before their trip, Vietnamese authorities released some prominent activists from prison before they completed their sentences, sources told Reuters.
They included Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in January 2010 on subversion charges, and environmental activist Hoang Thi Minh Hong, who was sentenced to three years in prison on tax fraud charges in September last year, but other dissidents remain in detention.
Sources told Reuters the United States has been urging Vietnam to shun Chinese companies in its plans to build 10 new undersea cables by 2030.
Vietnam has long maintained that it should free itself from the NME label given recent economic reforms and that keeping the moniker is bad for the increasingly close two-way ties that Washington sees as a counterweight to China.
But Murray Hiebert, a senior fellow with the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it was not Biden’s prerogative to offer concessions on the issue, given the Commerce Department’s criteria.
Opponents, including politically influential US labor lobbies, argue that Vietnam’s political commitments have not been translated into concrete actions and that the country is increasingly being used as a manufacturing hub by Chinese companies to circumvent US restrictions on imports from China.