The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 63 Now known for its dynamic economy, Vietnam has slowly but surely taken its place among the nations of the world. BY MURRAY H I EBERT Murray Hiebert serves as senior fellow and deputy director of the Sumitro Chair for Southeast Asia Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Stud- ies inWashington, D.C. Prior to joining CSIS, he was senior director for Southeast Asia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he worked to promote trade and investment opportunities between the United States and Asia. Earlier in his career, Mr. Hiebert reported for the Wall Street Journal Asia Edition and the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of two books on Vietnam: Chasing the Tigers (Kodansha, 1996) and VietnamNotebook (Review Publishing, 1993). O ver the last four decades, Viet- nam has morphed from the site of a bloody, protracted war into a country known for its dynamic economy, increasingly coopera- tive ties with the United States, and front-line status in the dispute with Beijing over the strategically critical South China Sea. During a visit to Vietnam in late 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry said that no two countries “have worked harder, done more and done better to try to bring themselves together and change history and change the future.” Vietnam’s roughly 92 million people live on a long, narrow strip of land with a 2,000-mile coast along the South China Sea, at the crossroads between Northeast Asia and mainland Southeast Asia. After Hanoi’s communist troops defeated the U.S.-backed southern forces in 1975 and introduced hard-line socialist poli- Vietnam Today FOCUS ON THE FOREIGN SERVICE IN VIETNAM cies, the country’s economy went into a tailspin. Vietnam’s ouster of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in neighboring Cambodia in 1979 triggered an invasion by China, raised tensions with neighboring countries and deepened its international isolation, including from the United States. With its economy in shambles, the ruling Communist Party in 1986 courted foreign investors and freed farmers from socialist cooperatives. It also pledged to withdraw its troops from Cambo- dia and step up its efforts to account for U.S. servicemen missing in Vietnam from the war. In 1994, President Bill Clinton lifted the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam and normalized diplomatic relations in 1995. That same year, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, established at the height of the Cold War to block the spread of communism, welcomed Vietnam as a member in its regional economic and political grouping. The Virtue of Trade Freed from collectives, Vietnam’s farmers turned the country from a rice importer into one of the world’s top rice exporters. The country’s economy has grown an average of about 6 percent a year since 2000, boosting its per capita income to just under $2,000 a year by 2013. An October 2014 Pew Research Center poll found that a whopping 95 percent of Vietnamese are enthusiastic about the free market, compared to only 70 percent of Americans. Bilateral trade with the United States soared from under $3 billion in 2001, when the two countries signed a bilateral trade agreement, to $35 billion last year. Today both countries are part of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations that, once completed, are expected to give bilateral economic relations an extra shot of adrenaline.