Vietnam's spring of suitors, and the one deal it can't close

For three months this spring, the line into Hanoi belonged to the people who wanted something from it. China's leader, South Korea's president, Japan's prime minister, and India's president each came with a delegation and a partnership to deepen. Vietnam said yes to all of them. That is the whole point of the foreign policy its ruling party reaffirmed in January, after re-electing To Lam to lead it: stay independent by owing no single power too much, and let the others bid.

The biggest bidder was the one next door. To Lam spent four days in Beijing in mid-April and came home with 32 agreements and a feasibility study for an $8.4 billion rail line linking the Chinese border to the port at Hai Phong. China framed the trip as a new era between two communist neighbors, and the disputed waters of the South China Sea went conspicuously quiet in the readouts. The quiet is the bargain. Vietnam keeps reinforcing its own reefs while agreeing, on paper, to manage the dispute through talks.

Then came the others, and they paid in the same currency. Seoul's president arrived in late April trailing the heads of Samsung, SK, and LG, who signed dozens of corporate deals and edged closer to building a chip plant on Vietnamese soil. Japan's prime minister chose Hanoi in early May to relaunch Tokyo's Indo-Pacific strategy and pledge deeper work on energy and critical minerals. Days later To Lam was in New Delhi, where he and Narendra Modi upgraded their partnership and set a $25 billion trade goal built around defense industry and rare earths.

The one relationship that did not resolve was the one that matters most to Vietnam's factories. A 20 percent tariff on Vietnamese goods, plus a punishing rate on anything Washington decides was merely rerouted from China, still hangs over the trade with the United States. An American court threw out the legal basis for some of those tariffs in February, replacing them with a temporary 10 percent rate, and a fresh U.S. trade investigation in March named Vietnam among its targets. Hanoi can host every other capital in Asia. It cannot yet tell its exporters what they will owe.