Vietnam's To Lam charts a middle path at the Shangri-La Dialogue

Vietnamese President To Lam told the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on 29 May 2026 that his country would resist any attempt to make it choose sides in an escalating great-power contest — and that the message was directed at more than one audience.

Speaking at the annual defense forum that brings together defense ministers and senior military officials from across the Indo-Pacific, To Lam outlined what Vietnamese officials call a doctrine of strategic balance. Hanoi would deepen partnerships across the board, he said, without entering arrangements that constrain its room to maneuver. The phrasing was deliberate and the timing was not accidental: a week earlier, the US had expanded restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to several Chinese-linked entities, and Beijing had responded with fresh pressure on countries in the region to reaffirm their alignment.

A doctrine tested by geography

Vietnam's position along the South China Sea — a corridor through which an estimated $3 trillion in trade passes annually — makes it one of the most consequential states in the Indo-Pacific. It shares a 1,400-kilometer border with China to the north and has spent decades managing that relationship while simultaneously building defense ties with the United States, Japan, India, and European partners.

The doctrine has a name in Vietnamese strategic thought: "bamboo diplomacy" (cây tre), the idea that a nation's roots run deep in its own interest even as the trunk bends with external pressure. For Vietnam, this has meant avoiding formal alliance commitments while cultivating a dense network of defense and economic partnerships. It has purchased Russian submarines, hosted US aircraft carrier visits, and signed defense cooperation agreements with Japan, India, Australia, South Korea, and several ASEAN counterparts.

At this year's Shangri-La Dialogue, To Lam appeared to sharpen the language. He warned against what he called "cold-war mentalities" and " bloc politics" reasserting themselves in the region, language that echoed — though did not directly name — Washington's push to consolidate partners into a more explicitly anti-China architecture. The address drew an audience of defense ministers who have been watching the same pressure from different angles.

Economic gravity, competing pulls

The strategic balance doctrine works only as long as the competing powers do not make the choice unavoidable. That condition is becoming harder to sustain.

The United States is Vietnam's largest export market and a significant source of foreign direct investment in semiconductors and electronics manufacturing. Samsung alone has invested over $18 billion in Vietnam, making the country central to the global electronics supply chain that Washington has been trying to reshore and diversify. The US has granted Vietnam preferential tariff treatment under various trade frameworks, and senior officials in Hanoi have watched with concern as Washington's tariff regime has become less predictable.

China, simultaneously, is Vietnam's largest source of imported electrical and mechanical equipment, a critical market for agricultural exports, and the dominant external actor shaping the South China Sea environment in which Vietnamese fishermen operate daily. Vietnam's trade deficit with Beijing runs into the tens of billions of dollars annually — a structural dependency that Chinese policymakers understand and, Vietnamese sources suggest, occasionally leverage in diplomatic exchanges.

The result is a position that is structurally coherent but operationally difficult. Hanoi cannot afford to antagonize either capital. It also cannot afford to be seen as abandoning the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity that its own foreign policy language enshrines — principles that become complicated when the parties treating them selectively are also the parties whose partnership Hanoi depends on.

What the bilateral architecture actually provides

Vietnam has signed what it calls "comprehensive strategic partnerships" with both the United States and China, alongside similar agreements with Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Thailand. No other country in ASEAN has a comparable roster. The phrasing is identical; the content is not, and Vietnamese diplomats are careful to keep it that way.

With Washington, the partnership centers on trade, investment, and technology cooperation, with a gradually expanding defense dialogue that has included coast guard port calls and military-to-military exchanges but no formal mutual defense commitment. With Beijing, it covers political coordination, infrastructure connectivity, and trade — alongside ongoing negotiations over disputed maritime boundaries that have produced some agreements but not a final resolution. With Russia, it includes legacy defense procurement that Vietnam has been quietly diversifying away from since Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted supply chains and exposed the vulnerabilities of depending on a single equipment provider.

The architecture is designed to make any one relationship replaceable by the others. That was the theory. The current environment is testing it in ways Hanoi did not fully anticipate when the framework was assembled.

Forward view: optionality under pressure

The trend lines point in a direction that makes Vietnam's current posture harder to maintain. The US-China contest is becoming more defined, not less. Supply chain reorganization — which Washington has actively incentivized through the CHIPS Act and related industrial policy — is drawing more Vietnamese integration into American-aligned production networks, which creates its own gravitational pull toward a more explicit position. Simultaneously, Vietnam's dependence on Chinese electricity infrastructure and equipment makes any decoupling from that relationship economically and practically non-viable in the near term.

Hanoi's approach for the period ahead is likely to involve more active diplomatic hedging: strengthening the non-aligned language in multilateral forums, deepening defense ties with India and Japan as a counterweight to over-reliance on any single external partner, and accelerating the diversification of its defense procurement away from Russian systems toward Western and indigenous alternatives. The country's 100 million people, its 3,000-kilometer coastline, and its position along the South China Sea transit corridor mean that neither Washington nor Beijing can afford to treat Vietnam as a peripheral player.

What To Lam was signaling in Singapore was not a new doctrine. It was a restatement of one that is under growing pressure — and an assertion that Hanoi intends to maintain it for as long as the structural conditions allow. The defense ministers in the audience understood exactly what that meant.

This publication compared its editorial framing of To Lam's remarks — emphasizing the structural tension in Vietnam's position rather than treating it as a mere diplomatic courtesy — against the wire framing, which led primarily with the surface language of strategic partnership. The structural frame, this desk believes, is the more accurate one.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/nikkeiasia