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US lifts decades-long embargo on arms sales to Vietnam US lifts decades-long embargo on arms sales to Vietnam
(about 2 hours later)
Barack Obama has lifted a decades-old arms export embargo for Vietnam during his first visit to the communist country, looking to bolster a government seen as a crucial, though flawed partner even as he pushes for better human rights from the one-party state. The United States has lifted a decades-old arms embargo on Vietnam in a historic move that follows the country’s growing assertiveness against China’s influence in the region.
The US president announced the full removal of the embargo at a news conference, saying the move was intended to step toward normalising relations with the former war enemy and to eliminate a “lingering vestige of the cold war”. Speaking on a visit to Hanoi, Barack Obama said Washington had fully lifted “the ban on the sale of military equipment to Vietnam that has been in place for some 50 years”. Obama is the third American president – after Bill Clinton and George W Bush – to visit since the war ended in 1975.
“At this stage both sides have developed a level of trust and cooperation,” Obama said, adding that he expected deepening cooperation between the two nation’s militaries. “At this stage both sides have developed a level of trust and cooperation,” he added during a joint press conference with Vietnamese president, Tran Dai Quang.
Obama is seeking to strike this balance with Vietnam amid Chinese efforts to strengthen claims to disputed territory in the South China Sea, one of the world’s most important waterways. Quang said the end to the embargo was “clear proof that both countries have completely normalised relation”.
Lifting the arms embargo will be a psychological boost for Vietnam’s leaders as they look to counter an increasingly aggressive China, but there may not be a big jump in sales. The Vietnamese president, Tran Dai Quang, thanked Obama for lifting the embargo. Despite a shared communist ideology, Vietnam is one of several nations engaged in a fierce territorial dispute with Beijing over islands and reefs in the South China Sea, a route for roughly £3.17tn in trade. The area is also thought to have significant oil and gas reserves.
US politicians and activists had urged the president to press the communist leadership for greater freedoms before lifting the embargo. Vietnam holds about 100 political prisoners and there have been more detentions this year. China has reclaimed several atolls that Vietnam says it owns, and built military installations and runways on some islands.
The US partially lifted the embargo in 2014, but Vietnam wanted full access as it tries to deal with China’s assertive land reclamation and military construction in nearby seas. Vietnam, a country of 90 million, has also been a key partner for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a US-led trade deal seen as a counter to China’s growing influence.
Vietnam has not bought anything, but removing the remaining restrictions shows relations are fully normalised and opens the way to deeper security cooperation. However, Obama said the decision to lift the ban was not based on China but on “our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process towards moving toward normalisation with Vietnam”.
After three days in Vietnam, Obama heads to Japan for an international summit and a visit to Hiroshima, where he will be the first sitting president to visit the site of the first atomic bomb attack. The Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times ran an editorial titled “Obama unable to turn Hanoi into an ally” and said while Beijing was a major opponent of Hanoi regarding the South China Sea, “the former is also considered by Hanoi’s mainstream elites as a political pillar for Vietnam’s stability”.
He arrived in Hanoi, the capital, late on Sunday, making him the third sitting president to visit the country since the end of the war. Four decades after the fall of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and two decades after Bill Clinton restored relations, Obama is eager to upgrade relations with an emerging power whose rapidly expanding middle class beckons as a promising market for US goods and an offset to China’s growing strength. Activist groups have called for Obama to push for greater respect for human rights in Vietnam, where there are about 100 political prisoners in jail. In March, seven activists were sentenced for “spreading anti-state propaganda”.
Obama was greeted on Monday by Quang at the presidential palace. He congratulated Vietnam for making “extraordinary progress” and said he hoped the visit would show a continued interest in strengthening ties in the years to come. The ruling Communist party has run a one-party state since 1954.
Obama will make the case for stronger commercial and security ties, including approval of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Trade agreement that is stalled in Congress and facing strong opposition from the 2016 presidential candidates. There has also been a recent round of arrests against environmental protesters, angered after 100 tonnes of dead fish were found near a Taiwanese-owned industrial complex.
The US is eager to boost trade with a fast-growing middle class in Vietnam that is expected to double by 2020. That would mean knocking down auto, food and machine tariffs to get more US products into Vietnam. The Vietnamese government has in recent days cracked down on any attempt to protest, blocking access to Facebook over the weekend.
In Japan, Obama will attend a summit of the Group of Seven industrialised nations, where the uncertain global economy will be a top concern. They will also grapple with a full array of world challenges, including the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and the refugee crisis in Europe. And on Sunday, the BBC reporting team was told their accreditation to cover Obama’s visit had been withdrawn without reason.
Obama will finish his trip in Hiroshima, where the US dropped the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people, ushering in the nuclear age seven decades ago. Another bomb killed 70,000 in Nagasaki three days later. Obama said on Monday that any future arms sales would nned to meet strict requirements “including those related to human rights”.
It will be a moment to reflect on the devastating costs of war and to try to give new impetus to the call for a nuclear-free world that Obama issued seven years ago in his first year as president. He has faced criticism, however, that his mere presence at the site of the atomic bomb explosion could be viewed as an apology for an act that many Americans see as justified. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, criticised the move.
“Obama has jettisoned what remained of US leverage to improve human rights in Vietnam – and basically gotten nothing for it,” he said.
“The United States government has been telling the Vietnam government for years that they need to show progress on their human rights record if they are going to be rewarded with closer military and economic ties. Yet today President Obama has rewarded Vietnam even though they have not done anything of note.”
Diplomatic ties between the US and Vietnam were restored in 1995. In 2007, the US allowed the sale of some nonlethal equipment and last December, Washington said it would provide five unarmed patrol boats to the Vietnamese coastguard.
Following his three-day trip in Vietnam, Obama will travel to Japan for a G7 summit and a visit to Hiroshima.
Reuters and AP contributed to this report.