Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on Thursday to promote trade ties as part of the Biden administration’s “friend-shoring” push to reshape global supply chains and cut US dependency on China.
Yellen is in Vietnam after attending the Group of Twenty finance chiefs meetings in India earlier this week. Both countries are crucial for US to reduce dependence on a handful of nations for critical components and products while shielding its economy from geopolitical risk.
“The United States considers Vietnam a key partner in advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Yellen said in prepared remarks delivered before meeting in Hanoi. “It is a priority for our Administration to deepen our economic and security ties with Vietnam in the months and years to come.”
The US normalized trade relations with its former enemy in 2007, more than three decades after the end of the Vietnam war. Trade has grown but has accelerated significantly since Washington imposed a raft of tariffs on Chinese goods under the Trump administration in 2018.
Since that year, imports from Vietnam have nearly tripled to $127 billion in 2022, according to data compiled by the US Census Bureau.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Vice President Kamala Harris have also visited Vietnam, but Yellen’s trip represents a more substantive effort by the US to deepen its economic relationship with Hanoi, according to Edmund Malesky, director of Duke University’s Center for International Development.
“I wouldn’t read it as symbolism at all,” he said. “It would mean that actual, real things are happening.”
Vietnam, like most Southeast Asian nations, has maintained neutrality over growing tensions between the US and China, and political leaders have stressed a foreign policy of independence and “self-reliance.” Washington, for it’s part, has emphasized trade, clean energy and energy transition as potential areas of cooperation between the two countries.
The Treasury chief also met with the governor of Vietnam’s central bank on Thursday, saying the US was grateful to Vietnam for resolving currency issues. Two years ago the US dropped the currency manipulator designation for Vietnam initially imposed by the Trump administration who accused the nation of intervening in the currency to gain an unfair trade advantage.
Yellen attended a lunch with women economists and is scheduled to deliver a speech at electric scooter and battery maker Selex Motors. On Friday she’ll meet Finance Minister Ho Duc Phoc.
