While the Vietnamese public watched the U.S. election with curiosity, the leadership in Hanoi probably looked at the results with trepidation. While Hanoi’s “bamboo diplomacy” of building balanced strategic relationships with major global powers gives it a measure of comfort, Vietnam is far more vulnerable to changes in U.S. economic and trade policies, not to mention security policy, than almost any other country in Southeast Asia.
Vietnam’s chronic and growing trade surpluses with the United States are now likely to be at the forefront of the bilateral relationship. In 2017, the first full year of the Trump presidency, Vietnam had a $38.3 billion trade surplus with the United States. By 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, that trade surplus had ballooned to $69.7 billion, according to the U.S. Census data.