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Vietnam FOREIGN RELATIONS
https://photius.com/countries/vietnam/government/vietnam_government_foreign_relations.html
Sources: The Library of Congress Country Studies; CIA World Factbook
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    [JPEG]

    Statue representing Vietnamese and Cambodian solidarity, Prey veng, Cambodia
    Courtesy Bill Herod

    [JPEG]

    Lang Son following 1979 Chinese invasion
    Courtesy Bill Herod

    [JPEG]

    Ho Chi Minh City poster portrays American and Chinese "aggressors," 1979.
    Courtesy Bill Herod

    Until the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975, the VCP considered foreign policy interests to be subordinate to the overriding issue of national liberation and reunification. Only with the end of the war did Hanoi turn its full attention to foreign policy concerns. Among the more pressing were its relations with Laos, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, the member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the West. Like domestic policy, foreign policy required the reconciliation of ideology and nationalism.

    From an ideological standpoint, the Vietnamese saw themselves as fulfilling their international socialist duty by defeating a major "imperialist" enemy and by carrying out a revolution that could be a model for the Third World. Communist ideology in turn served Vietnamese nationalism by providing a justification for the pursuit of its nationalist goals. A Marxist-Leninist historical view, for example, justified creating an alliance of the three Indochinese countries because such an alliance was instrumental in the struggle against imperialism. By the same reasoning, Hanoi's decision in 1978 to overthrow the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia was defensible on the grounds that a new government more closely dedicated to Marxist-Leninist principles was required in Cambodia in order to reestablish an effective alliance against imperialism. Ideological and nationalist goals thus were often interchangeable, and Vietnamese foreign policy could be construed as serving national interests and international communism at the same time. In the final analysis, however, nationalism and national security remained the primary foreign policy concerns.

    Data as of December 1987


    NOTE: The information regarding Vietnam on this page is re-published from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook. No claims are made regarding the accuracy of Vietnam FOREIGN RELATIONS information contained here. All suggestions for corrections of any errors about Vietnam FOREIGN RELATIONS should be addressed to the Library of Congress and the CIA.

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https://photius.com/countries/vietnam/government/vietnam_government_foreign_relations.html

Revised 12-Nov-04
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