As shadow of war fades, Obama visits a Vietnam focused on trade and better relations

When President Obama arrives in Vietnam early Monday he will encounter both a youthful, liberalizing society and an aging communist leadership slow to change its authoritarian ways.

The welcome from both will be enthusiastic, analysts agree, because relations have never been better between the old adversaries in what is called here “the American War.”

Under the Obama administration, “relations have really deepened quite dramatically,” said Murray Hiebert, a Southeast Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Vietnam is considered a key player in Obama’s long-stated effort to “rebalance” U.S. foreign policy in Asia.

China’s island-building in a disputed swath of the South China Sea has brought to the fore the countries’ shared interest in protecting access to waters through which about $5 trillion in trade is shipped every year and raised the potential for military cooperation as Vietnam aims to move out from under its giant neighbor’s shadow.

Vietnam and the Philippines both applauded the Obama administration when it sent a U.S. warship cruising within view of Chinese construction projects on a rocky archipelago that is also claimed by the two countries.

The U.S. has said it does not take sides regarding the competing claims to islands and reefs in the area but is committed to freedom of navigation in international waters. U.S. officials are concerned that China eventually wants to use the islets for military purposes and is ultimately seeking to push U.S. forces out of what it regards as its own backyard.

Obama’s two-day visit to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City aims to build on other high-level meetings, including one between the president and Nguyen Phu Tong, the 72-year-old Vietnam Communist Party general secretary, in Washington last year.

Topping the agenda are Vietnam’s desire to purchase more U.S. weaponry and the U.S. Navy’s interest in being able to resupply and make repairs at Cam Ranh Bay, the strategic port built by U.S. forces in an attempt to prevent the toppling of the South Vietnamese government in 1975.

Vietnam is also seeking assurances of enhanced trade with the U.S. regardless of the fate of the 12-nation Pacific Rim deal that still needs congressional approval. Vietnam — the least developed of the 12, and the only one under communist leadership — anticipates a hefty boost to an already bustling economy that has spawned a growing middle class.

Excitement surrounding Obama’s visit — the first by a U.S. president in a decade — could help explain a recent surge on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, said Hanoi economist Quan Hoang Vuong.

Human rights activists are urging U.S. leaders to use the visit to press their Vietnamese counterparts to stop persecuting political and religious dissidents. Hanoi has become less oppressive than in years past, Hiebert said, but about 100 Vietnamese citizens remain in prison for political reasons.

In a move widely seen as a goodwill gesture before Obama’s arrival, Vietnam granted early release to a Catholic priest, the Rev. Nguyen Van Ly, who is one of the country’s most prominent dissidents.

However, the visit is expected to coincide with a hunger strike by another prisoner, jailed human rights activist Tran Huynh Duy Thuc.

Brad Adams, Asia director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Thuc bucked authorities who tried to force him to accept exile in the U.S. or remain in prison — an approach used with other dissidents.

Obama should insist that Thuc and other peaceful activists “are released from prison and allowed to live free from government harassment in their own country,” Adams said in a statement.

The authoritarian reflex was on display recently when police beat and detained protesters who were angry about the government’s handling of a massive fish die-off along the central coast in April that raised concerns about the nation’s food supply, according to the rights group.

Officials blamed a “terrorist” group with ties to the Vietnamese immigrant community in the U.S. for organizing a the protest in Ho Chi Minh City.

“First, Viet Tan is not a terrorist group,” said Carlyle Thayer, a Southeast Asia scholar at the Australian Defense Force Academy. Secondly, he said, “The charge that Viet Tan was involved is obviously designed to undermine the legitimacy of public protests and distract attention from the government’s poor handling of the dead fish issue.”

Vietnam today is dramatically different from the country that President George W. Bush visited in 2006 and President Clinton in 2000. Normalization of relations in 1995 — 20 years after the end of a war estimated to have claimed up to 2 million lives — accelerated Vietnam’s transition from a dysfunctional, centrally planned economy to what it calls “market-oriented socialism.”

The country emerged from post-war misery to become one of the world’s top exporters of rice, coffee, seafood and textiles. Multinational companies such as Samsung and Intel Corp. have invested billions into a growing tech sector, helping Vietnam to edge into global middle-income status as measured by the World Bank.

With rising prosperity, the economic contrasts have grown starker: Millions still live in poverty while sales of SUVs and luxury sedans have soared.

In Hanoi, peddlers who earn a few dollars a day shoulder yoke-like ganhs as they walk past new shopping malls that cater to soaring consumer culture, and the hammer-and-sickle still waves.

A popular coffeehouse chain called Cong Ca Phe salutes the irony with commie kitsch decor that mixes Marx and Lenin paperbacks with black-and-white wartime images. The cocktail menu includes a B-52, named after the American bomber than once rained death and destruction on this land.

Vietnam’s youth — about two-thirds of its 90 million people were born after the 1975 reunification of the North and South — have embraced social media, a global outlook and more liberal values. Increased prosperity has enabled young Vietnamese to travel more widely; about 17,000 attend school in the U.S.

Just four years after Hanoi held its first gay pride parade, the decriminalization of same-sex unions and a law allowing people to alter their gender have put Vietnam at the forefront of the gay rights movement in Asia. It is a cause championed by the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Ted Osius, and his husband, Clayton Bond, who often attend public events with their children.

The hope in some quarters is that Vietnam’s new social attitudes will lead to greater freedom of expression.

But the great leap forward in gay rights has not seemed to nudge authorities toward greater tolerance of political dissent. In the human rights field, one Western diplomat said, gay rights “is an easy box to check off.”

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Harris is a special correspondent.