By Steve Holland and Simon Lewis
NEW YORK (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden met Vietnam’s president To Lam for talks on Wednesday, aiming to deepen relations with the Southeast Asian country and manufacturing hub and counter its ties with China and Russia.
Biden and Lam, the ruling Communist Party chief making his first visit to the U.S. as president, met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Lam has met this week in New York with representatives of U.S. companies, including Meta (META.O), which pledged to expand investments in the Communist-ruled country with a population of 100 million.
Lam asked business leaders to back Hanoi’s bid to have Washington remove it from the list of non-market economies (NMEs) and lift other trade restrictions and for the U.S. and Vietnam to cooperate on semiconductor supply chains.
Biden visited Hanoi a year ago and secured deals on semiconductors and minerals and an upgrade in diplomatic ties, despite U.S. concerns about human rights issues.
On meeting Biden on Wednesday, Lam hailed what he called Biden’s “historic contribution” to elevating bilateral relations.
Biden said that since beginning a new era in relations last year, the two countries had made historic investments in semiconductors and supply chains and launched unprecedented cooperation on cybersecurity.
He also said they stood united in commitments to freedom of navigation and the rule of law – a reference to regional maritime disputes with China.
Recalling his address to the U.N. assembly on Tuesday, Biden added: “There’s nothing beyond our capacity if we work together.”
Lam spoke at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday and his travels include a stop in Cuba, Vietnam’s long-term Communist partner.
Ahead of his trip, Vietnamese authorities released some prominent activists from prison before the end of their jail terms, sources told Reuters.
They included Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in January 2010 on charges of subversion, and environment activist Hoang Thi Minh Hong, who was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of tax fraud in September last year, but other dissidents remain in detention.
Sources told Reuters that the United States has been urging Vietnam to avoid Chinese companies in its plans to build 10 new undersea cables by 2030.
While Lam was likely to raise the NME issue, it was not Biden’s prerogative to offer concessions on that, given Commerce Department criteria, said Murray Hiebert, a senior associate of the Southeast Asia Program at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Vietnam has long argued that it should be freed of the NME label given recent economic reforms and that retaining the moniker is bad for increasingly close two-way ties that Washington sees as a counterbalance to China.
Opponents, including politically influential U.S. labor lobbies, argue Vietnam’s policy commitments have not been matched by concrete actions and it is increasingly being used as a manufacturing hub by Chinese firms to circumvent U.S. curbs on imports from China.
U.S. Representative Michelle Steel, a California Republican who represents a large population of Vietnamese Americans, called on Biden to directly address worsening human rights abuses in Vietnam under Lam’s leadership.
Hiebert said he did not expect the meeting to go much beyond “a brief courtesy meet and greet” given that Biden has four months left to his term and Lam only took office in August after nearly two years of political turmoil due to Vietnam’s anti-corruption campaign.
“I think the two leaders will recommit to the comprehensive strategic partnership agreed to one year ago, but on which few implementing initiatives have been taken because of the distraction in Hanoi,” he said.
Alexander Vuving, a Vietnam expert at the Hawaii-based Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, said the meeting was important to helping Lam consolidate power.
Geopolitically it would signal Vietnam’s balanced position between the great powers, given Lam’s recent visit to China and meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the importance of the Hanoi relationship in U.S. Asia policy, Vuving said.
(Reporting by Steve Holland and Simon Lewis in New York; additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by Don Durfee and Howard Goller)
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