- Introduced by Professor Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism; author The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam
- Written by Former Ambassador Hoang Thang Dinh, Ph.D. in Political Science and Fellow of the Caux Round Table
What comes next for Vietnam in the twenty-first century?
A TRANSFORMING VIETNAM IN A TRANSFORMING WORLD
If Resilient Continuity is the capacity not to disappear, and Maturity is the capacity to become a activist conscious of who one is and what one has to do, then Opening Up poses a more difficult question: What will Vietnam transform to use its freedom to choose in a world where all the rules of the game are themselves changing at the same time.
This is no longer the relatively familiar world experienced during the decades following the Cold War, when globalization appeared to be an ever-widening current of human progress, markets seemed destined to become increasingly integrated, and it was still possible to distinguish with some confidence the demands of economics and security, technology and geopolitics. Those boundaries are now becoming blurred. Tariffs can serve as strategic instruments; semiconductors have become matters of national security; data and artificial intelligence are generating new forms of power; and supply chains simultaneously bind economies together and expose their vulnerabilities to one another.
It may therefore be premature to describe what is emerging simply as a “new world order.” An order implies rules that have already acquired a certain degree of stability. What we are witnessing looks more like a transforming global configuration: the old has not disappeared, the new has not yet taken shape; competition and cooperation coexist; and economic interdependence does not eliminate strategic rivalry but can instead create new sources of vulnerability.
For Vietnam, this uncertainty brings both danger and opportunity.
It is dangerous because a medium-sized country bordering China, heavily dependent on international trade and deeply embedded in cross-border supply chains, cannot easily insulate itself from systemic shocks originating from abroad. Yet precisely because the system is in transition, strategic and tactical spaces for choice have not been entirely closed off. A country does not have to become a great power in order to acquire strategic value. In a networked world, a nation’s position increasingly depends not only on how large it is, but also on what it connects, what capabilities it possesses, and how much others need what it can provide.
Opening Up therefore does not pose the question of whom Vietnam should “side with.” It asks a different question: What kind of activist must Vietnam become if it is to make its own choices and not have those choices made for it by others?
18. FROM THE CURSE OF GEOGRAPHY TO THE CAPACITY TO CHOOSE
Geography has been and still is among the most consequential drivers of Vietnamese history.
A long, narrow country facing the South China Sea, situated where continental East Asia meets Southeast Asia, and sharing a border with an immense center of power to the north: this geographical structure has brought opportunities for exchange, but also incoming pressures with which virtually every generation of Vietnamese has had to contend.
One may call this a “curse of geography,” provided that the word curse is understood not as destiny but as a problem that can never be removed from the table. Vietnam cannot choose its neighbor, but it can choose how to live beside that neighbor. It cannot change China’s size, but it can change its own strength, the breadth of its relationships, and the costs that any potential intruder must consider before attempting to exert its pressure upon the Vietnamese.
Vietnamese history, in this sense, is not merely a history of struggling against geography. It is also a history of learning how to use geography.
Looking upon the Bạch Đằng estuary, Nguyễn Trãi once wrote:
“The mountains and rivers form a natural stronghold;
Here heroes of old established their renown.”
Nature may create thế — a favorable configuration or strategic position — but human beings turn that position into history. The natural feature of Bạch Đằng did not win battles by itself. Mountains and rivers can provide terrain; they cannot provide strategy, organization, will, or timing.
This is even more true in the twenty-first century.
The South China Sea today is not merely a space of competing sovereignty claims. It is also part of one of the world’s most important maritime trading corridors. Vietnam’s geography is therefore simultaneously a vulnerability and an asset of connectivity. But geography becomes a strategic asset only when a country can convert location into capability.
A well-situated seaport is not yet a logistics hub. A country located within global supply chains does not necessarily control any critical link in those chains. A country that attracts foreign factories does not automatically acquire the technology, data, intellectual property, or design capabilities behind them. Nor does being courted by several great powers necessarily give a country greater freedom of choice if its economy and institutions remain dependent upon resources it does not control. How then does a country “add value” to the global economy so that others seek its collaboration and honor its desires?
This is where the concept I call the “comprehensive entanglement” of Vietnam–China relations becomes particularly important.
The relationship between Vietnam and China cannot be reduced to a “win-lose” binary of friendship or confrontation. This complex entanglement of two peoples intersects with almost every major paradox of Vietnamese history: cultural proximity and differentiation; borrowing and resistance to assimilation; war and accommodation; asymmetry of power; party-to-party relations; the land border; the South China Sea; trade; supply chains; security; and the perennial problem of national autonomy.
Reducing dependence on China therefore cannot mean escaping all relationships with China. Geography does not offer Vietnam that option, nor would its national interest require such a simple-minded choice.
The challenge is to move from asymmetric dependence toward manageable interdependence.
That requires a perspective more sober than either anti-Chinese sentiment or illusions created by the rhetoric of friendship. China is at once an unavoidable neighbor, a major market and supplier, and a great power whose interests do not always coincide with those of Vietnam. Precisely because this relationship is so broad, deep, and geographically immediate, autonomy cannot be protected by well-phrased diplomatic declarations alone. It must be institutionalized in economic, technological, defense, institutional, and international-networking capabilities.
This produces an important paradox: to live independently beside a great power, the most important step may not be to reduce every connection with that power, but to increase the number of other external relationships and internal capabilities upon which it can rely.
This is why “multilateralization and diversification” become substantially advantageous only when they produce greater freedom of choice.
If strategic inputs still come overwhelmingly from one source; if exports remain vulnerable to a handful of markets; if core technologies must still be acquired from abroad; and if domestic firms remain concentrated in activities goods and services which can easily be relocated elsewhere, then having more diplomatic partners does not necessarily bring about greater strategic autonomy.
Vietnam has often been described as being relatively successful in hedging among the major powers, aided by its geostrategic location, expanding network of relationships, and growing importance in reconfigured supply chains. Yet the long-term limit of such “in-betweenness” is equally clear: Vietnam’s position will ultimately depend on whether it can convert a favorable location into institutional capabilities that are difficult for others to replace. Vietnam can’t change its location; it can only deploy human and social capitals to make the most of that location and its possibilities – most importantly the possibilities to be realized by its people.
To overcome the curse of geography, therefore, does not mean defeating geography.
It means refusing to allow geography to dictate one’s place in history and world affairs.
19. FROM “STANDING IN BETWEEN” TO PARTICIPATING IN NETWORKS
For many years, Vietnam’s position has been described through metaphors such as “balancing,” “hedging,” “bamboo diplomacy,” or standing somewhat in-between the great powers. Such descriptions capture part of the reality of a country determined not to be drawn fully into major-power confrontation. Yet they can also create an illusion: that the world is essentially a chessboard dominated by a few major players, while Vietnam’s task is mainly to find a relatively safe square on which to stand.
The issue can be explored at a deeper level. The Vietnamese historian Trần Quốc Vượng once argued that one of the great and complex theoretical questions was the mutually conditioning relationship between entities called nation-states and the larger whole that we call human or world history, with yet another layer in between: regions and civilizations. In his view, this dimension of mutuality was notably underdeveloped in Marxist historiography. His formulation helps us avoid two opposite errors: treating national history as an isolated ecosystem, or dissolving it into an abstract universalism.
Vietnam can be imagined as a drop of water in the ocean. The drop has properties of its own, yet it cannot exist outside the ocean tides, currents, and storms of the greater sea all send it here or there. But the relationship is not entirely one-way. The ocean itself consists of countless drops, and its great currents emerge from interactions among innumerable smaller elements. Vietnam is shaped by the world, but through its choices, capabilities, and connections, Vietnam also participates in shaping a part of the world in which it lives.
This perspective is particularly appropriate to the present global configuration. Power is no longer distributed only among states; it also flows through overlapping networks of technology, finance, energy, data, and supply chains. A country may cooperate with one partner on security, depend upon another for technology, have its largest export market in a third, while simultaneously adapting to regulatory systems established by several different centers of power. The nation-state has not disappeared under globalization. Rather, it must learn to exercise its agency in an environment where sovereignty increasingly takes advantage of interdependence.
This is the ideal of associative power, which is more fluid, collaborative, multi-vectored, that either hard power or soft power. Through association – checks and balances leading to partnerships, seeking equilibrium – one people can gain lasting benefits from many others.
One striking manifestation is the emerging division of the global economy around the United States, China, and the European Union. Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa has described one aspect of this process as “trifurcation”: not a simple division into two opposing blocs, but the emergence of overlapping and competing legal-economic spaces. Tariffs, export controls, technology standards, data rules, investment screening, and extraterritorial enforcement are increasingly instruments of geoeconomic power. A firm or country may therefore operate simultaneously within several networks whose rules are not always compatible.
Yet power within this system does not belong only to its largest actors. Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and other economies that are not superpowers occupy critical positions because they possess technologies, equipment, or production capabilities that global value chains cannot readily replace. In a networked world, power is therefore measured not only by territory, population, or military assets, but also by the ability to occupy a position whose absence would create difficulties elsewhere in the system.
This reality demands that Vietnam must move beyond the mentality of merely “standing in between.” If the world is only a chessboard of great powers, smaller states must principally learn how not to be crushed between larger pieces. But if the world is also a network, a medium-sized country can increase its autonomy by becoming a valuable node within that network. The strategic question is no longer simply where Vietnam should position itself between the United States and China, but what Vietnam can create or possess that important networks will themselves need and so will reach out to Vietnam with favorable proposals.
This shift in strategic thinking from a focus on position to one of building capability is fundamental. Geography largely gives a country its position; capabilities must be built.
The idea of a strategic chokepoint must therefore be understood more broadly than a strait on a map. A twenty-first-century chokepoint may be a maritime route, but it may also be a manufacturing technology, a particular semiconductor, a critical mineral, a technical standard, a data resource, a payment system, or a specialized stage of a supply chain. Vietnam cannot and need not control all such links. What matters is identifying areas where geography, human resources, and organizational capability can be combined to create value that is sufficiently important and sufficiently difficult to replace.
Artificial intelligence now intensifies the significance of this challenge. For countries that are still catching up, AI offers possibilities for narrowing certain gaps, but it can also create an additional layer of dependence. A society may use millions of AI tools and still remain primarily a consumer if its data, computing infrastructure, models, intellectual property, and most of the economic value reside elsewhere. The challenge, therefore, is not merely to adopt AI quickly but to move fast without moving blindly: to exploit new technology while developing the people, data, and capabilities necessary to control at least part of the value it generates.
A broader principle is visible here: technology can amplify the capabilities of an activist, but it cannot create the intentionality needed to become such an existential actor. A country lacking the capacity to choose may acquire the most advanced technologies and still operate largely under conditions established elsewhere. A country that knows what it needs and can organize itself accordingly may use the same technology to enlarge its own room for action.
From this perspective, an idea first developed decades ago may deserve to be reconsidered under new conditions. P&DOWN — Partnership, Democratization, Organizing, Wisdom, Networking — was originally conceived as a way of thinking about the capacities Vietnam would need in the post-Cold War world. There is no need here to develop the entire paradigm. But its two outward-facing elements have acquired new meanings. Partnership should mean not merely having more partners, but having more choices; Networking should mean not merely accumulating relationships, but making Vietnam a valuable component of networks that others themselves have an interest in sustaining. Partnership and Networking thus become enhancements to sustaining autonomy.
Yet this brings us back to the Vietnamese as a “drop of water.” Opening oneself to the ocean does not mean dissolving into it. The broader the connections, the more important endogenous capacity becomes, because a network increases the power of a country only when that country has something of value to bring into the network. Otherwise, integration may enlarge markets and produce growth without proportionately enlarging freedom of choice.
The necessary transition is therefore not from “standing in between” to “choosing sides,” but from standing in between to participating, from participating to creating value, and from creating value to acquiring the capacity to help shape the networks to which one belongs. Vietnam may remain only one drop in the vast ocean of human history, but maturity means understanding that this drop is both carried by larger currents and capable of contributing to the currents themselves.
Diplomacy, in that sense, can no longer be merely the art of finding a safe position between external forces. It must become part of national capability: transforming geography into connectivity, connectivity into value, and value into freedom of choice. Only then can Vietnam move from sitting on the chessboard to participating in shaping moves in the game.
20. FROM INTEGRATION TO ENDOGENOUS CAPACITY
During the decades of Đổi Mới economics, international integration has been one of Vietnam’s most consequential strategic choices. From a relatively closed economy, Vietnam has become deeply engaged in global trade, attracted large flows of foreign investment, expanded its export markets, and entered numerous transnational production networks. Yet this very success raises the question that defines the next stage: Does deeper participation in the world necessarily make a country proportionately stronger?
Not automatically. Integration can generate growth without creating sufficient autonomy. It can place a country inside supply chains without enabling it to control the activities where the greatest value is created. An economy can become a major exporter while remaining heavily dependent on external inputs, components, technologies, and markets. During favorable periods these limitations may remain obscured; when geoeconomic competition intensifies, they quickly become sources of vulnerability.
We therefore need to distinguish openness from the capacity to open up. Openness without more measures the extent to which an economy is connected with the outside world. The capacity for opening up concerns whether those connections can be converted into knowledge, technology, enterprises, human capital, and capabilities of one’s own. A country is genuinely open not merely because goods and capital cross its borders easily, but because its society can learn, absorb, innovate, and ultimately create value that others seek from it.
Foreign investment, from this perspective, should not be measured only by registered capital or export turnover. The more difficult question is what remains after ten or twenty years: how much technology has been absorbed, how many domestic suppliers have matured, how many Vietnamese firms have climbed toward higher levels of the value chain. If a factory can move elsewhere and most of the knowledge, technology, and decision-making capacity move with it, the host country possesses the location of production more than it possesses the capability to make that production possible.
Changes in today’s global economy make this question increasingly urgent. What was once treated mainly as a matter of efficiency — where to buy most cheaply, where to manufacture most conveniently — is now being considered with the same thoughtfulness as security, resilience, and control of one’s destiny. Major powers employ tariffs, subsidies, export controls, industrial policy, and technology standards to reshape supply chains. In such an environment, the advantages of a country can no longer rest principally on inexpensive labor or investment incentives. They increasingly depend on the quality of its people, infrastructure, legal system, institutional reliability, and capacity to develop capabilities that are difficult to replace.
Stephen M. Walt’s warning about strategic “quagmires” has implications beyond the wars he was directly discussing. Countries can become trapped not only because an intervention was misguided from the outset, but because policies persist after their original assumptions have ceased to hold. Ignorance, one-sided advice, groupthink, overconfidence, and the prestige invested in earlier decisions can make it progressively harder to acknowledge that a course needs correction. Strategic capacity therefore lies not only in the determination to pursue a policy, but sometimes in the ability to recognize when to correct it, how to limit losses, or adopt an entirely new direction.
This is particularly important for countries without unlimited resources. A great power may absorb the costs of its mistake for years and still retain substantial capacity for recovery. A medium-sized country rarely enjoys such luxury. Vietnam therefore needs a capability that development strategies do not always emphasize sufficiently: the capacity for self-correction. This requires information accurate enough to challenge assumptions, debate open enough to reveal alternatives, and mechanisms through which inconvenient signals can still reach those responsible for decisions.
Endogenous capacity, however, is not only about avoiding mistakes. It is also the ability to transform existing resources into new capabilities. Education must produce people capable of continuing to learn, rather than merely completing a curriculum; firms must progress from subcontracting toward design and innovation; science must connect with production; and Vietnamese abroad must have channels through which their knowledge and networks can contribute to national capacity. An economy that merely imports machines will always await the next generation of machines from elsewhere. A society that learns how to create knowledge can begin on its own to build that next generation.
Artificial intelligence provides an especially clear test of this distinction. Vietnam’s new national AI strategy emphasizes human resources, infrastructure, data, research, development, and technological mastery rather than simply the adoption of AI. The significance of this direction lies in the underlying question: will Vietnam become primarily a market for the artificial intelligence of others, or will it acquire the capacity to create some of its own data, products, firms, intellectual property, and value?
The principle of moving fast without moving blindly therefore extends well beyond AI. In an age when technology changes faster than many policy cycles, moving too slowly can mean losing an opportunity; but chasing every new technological wave can create new layers of dependency. Opening Up demands something more difficult than either caution or enthusiasm: enough speed not to miss the moment, enough judgment to know where one is going, and enough capability not to hand the steering wheel entirely to technology, capital, or models created elsewhere.
The distance between a national strategy on paper and having a genuine national capability is always the distance between organization and implementation. Ambitious objectives become deployable strengths only when they are taken up by schools, research institutes, firms, public administration, and so ultimately become activated capabilities nested in real people. The next stage of global integration therefore cannot simply mean more integration. It must mean deeper absorption, faster learning, and greater creation. If the first stage of Đổi Mới opened Vietnam’s doors to the world, the new stage of Opening Up must enable Vietnam to turn what it receives from the world into capabilities of its own.
For a country can possess meaningful freedom of choice only when it also possesses the capacity to act effectively upon its preferred choices.
21. FROM ADAPTATION TO STRATEGIC AUTONOMY
Vietnam has demonstrated a considerable capacity for adaptation. Centuries of living beside major centers of power, followed by war, colonial rule, division, changes in the international order, and economic integration have cultivated a flexibility repeatedly visible in Vietnamese history. Yet adaptation alone does not guarantee autonomy. A country can become highly skilled at adapting to rules created by others without acquiring much capacity to influence those rules or make its own rules.
The distinction is that adaptation responds while autonomy chooses freely. Adaptation asks what must be done in response to circumstances already present. Autonomy looks at a farther horizon: what must be built today so that more options become available tomorrow? Strategic autonomy therefore does not mean autarky, still less withdrawal from international connections. In an interdependent world, practical autonomy is often created by diversifying dependencies, strengthening domestic capabilities, and preventing any single relationship from becoming irreplaceable.
This is especially important in relations with great powers. A small or medium-sized country cannot normally match them symmetrically in material power, but asymmetry in this or that efficacy need not become generalized dependence. Some of the imbalances can be offset through international law, partnerships, economic networks, strategic geography, and, above all, the internal strength of society. The greater a country’s capabilities and the broader its reliable relationships, the higher the cost to outsiders of forcing it into a choice it does not wish to make.
Thus, “not choosing sides” has its best value only if it rests upon the ability to choose freely and widely. If a country cannot refuse a demand, replace a supplier, shift a market, defend an interest, or endure short-term pressure, the language of balance may simply conceal a dependency that has not been named. Autonomy is not found in maintaining equal rhetorical distance from every great power; it lies in the number and quality of genuine alternatives still available when a crisis arrives.
Vietnam’s relationship with China illustrates the limits of simplistic balancing particularly well. The “comprehensive entanglement” between the two countries runs through politics, economics, culture, security, supply chains, and geography. It cannot be managed by attempting to “escape” China, but neither should the depth of the relationship allow China to acquire the power to veto Vietnam’s strategic choices. The challenge is therefore not to determine an absolute degree of closeness to or distance from China, but to maintain a necessary relationship without losing the capacity to say “no” when the national interest requires it.
The same principle applies to the United States and other Western partners. Deeper relations with them can provide markets, technology, education, capital, and greater strategic space, but no external partnership can substitute for the building of internal strength. If a distant great power is regarded mainly as a means of escaping pressure from a nearby one, Vietnam merely exchanges one psychology of dependence for another. The more durable safeguard for smaller states is not the discovery of a perfect patron, but the ability to ensure that multiple partners acquire a stake in their stability, independence, and success.
External partnerships, however, constitute only half of autonomy. The other half lies within the purposeful agent. A society unable to hear inconvenient information, an administrative system unable to correct policy before costs become excessive, or an economy that keeps resources trapped for too long in inefficient sectors – all diminish a country’s capacity for constructive activism. Wanting to possess strategic autonomy therefore ultimately returns us to domestic institutional quality, organizational capacity, and the ability of a political community to correct itself – which taken together make for the internalized psycho-social communal process of Maturation and Opening Up.
This outcome also requires resisting another temptation: equating the name of an institutional model with its actual outcomes. Comparisons among the United States, China, Vietnam, Singapore, or the Nordic countries sometimes lead to a question more useful than the labels “capitalist” or “communist”: Through what mechanisms are power and wealth connected, who controls that connection, and who ultimately benefits from growth? Yet this is only one dimension. It cannot replace asking probing questions about the rule of law, citizens’ rights, accountability, or the capacity to change policy. No political system can be assessed solely by nominal formalisms, or solely by its growth rate.
What should be retained from such comparisons is a simple principle: no ideological brand in itself guarantees good governance or good outcomes. What matters more is whether concrete institutions prevent power structures and private interests from becoming permanently interdependent; whether mechanisms for correcting policies exist; and whether development enlarges the capacity of ordinary people to live, create, and choose. A society can change its slogans repeatedly while leaving its underlying operating structure largely untouched.
Opening Up for Vietnamese should therefore not be understood as a search for the next imported model. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Nordic countries, and the United States all offer experiences worth studying, but each success arose from a distinctive history, social structure, and geopolitical environment. Learning becomes useful only when Vietnam can recognize and appreciate principles that can be learned from foreign models but which cannot simply be copied and engraved on the Vietnamese soul
Strategic autonomy, in this sense, is not a condition attained once and then permanently secured. It is a continuous process of creating additional options and reducing the points at which others can decide on one’s behalf. Sometimes that requires another partner; sometimes a new technology; sometimes better institutions; and sometimes the capacity to admit that a policy once useful has reached its limits.
A mature nation does not demonstrate strength by never changing course. Strength also lies in knowing when to continue, when to adjust, and when to seek another path.
This brings Opening Up into dialogue with an ancient problem that has never ceased to be relevant: geography may create thế (a disposition of reality); human beings may devise mưu (big plans) and kế (little plans); but history opens its doors only when a community recognizes thời (the realities of the times).
This is where we must recall the thinking of Hoàng Minh Thảo.
22. FROM THẾ TO THỜI
In Vietnamese strategic thought, thế is an unusually rich concept. Looking upon Bạch Đằng, Nguyễn Trãi saw that mountains and rivers could create a favorable configuration, but terrain alone could not make history. His second line brought human agency to the center: heroes had once made their names there. Nature creates thế; human beings recognize it, employ it, and, at exceptional moments, transform relationships that once appeared fixed.
Centuries later, General and scholar Hoàng Minh Thảo expressed this strategic logic succinctly through four interconnected concepts: Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời. Mưu is strategic insight — seeing what others have not yet seen. Kế translates insight into a course of action. Thế is the configuration of forces and conditions that has been created or accumulated. Thời is the moment when these elements converge and make transformation possible. None stands alone. An opportunity without a favorable configuration may disappear unused; a favorable position without strategy can be wasted; and even the most sophisticated plan will fail if it misreads the limits and timing of circumstances.
To apply Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời in the twenty-first century is not to convert military experience into a doctrine of national development. Its deeper value lies in viewing history as a field of possibilities, a field theory resting on integration of the plural. Circumstances create constraints, but they do not determine every outcome. Human beings can accumulate capabilities that alter the balance, and they must be sufficiently alert to recognize when a window of opportunity is opening. Here traditional Vietnamese strategic wisdom meets the requirements of a Vietnam facing a transforming world.
Vietnam today possesses several elements of thế. Its geography places it at the intersection of continental East Asia and maritime Southeast Asia; a highly open economy connects it to numerous production networks; its international relationships have expanded considerably; and a population approaching one hundred million provides a substantial market and human-resource base. Competition among centers of power has also increased the strategic value of countries able to connect different networks without becoming wholly incorporated into a single bloc.
Yet possessing some amount of thế does not mean possessing sufficient strength, still less that one has correctly taken advantage of thời. A factory relocated to Vietnam may reflect the restructuring of supply chains, but it becomes enduring national strength only if Vietnamese firms and workers absorb its technology. An upgraded partnership may open a door, but its ultimate value depends on what passes through that door. Great-power rivalry may increase Vietnam’s strategic relevance, but it may equally increase pressure if the country lacks the capacity to manage conflicting demands.
Thời, therefore, should not be understood as a gift bestowed by history. An opportune time truly exists only for the activist prepared to recognize and use it. Some countries encounter favorable international circumstances only to watch them pass because institutions fail to move, education fails to keep pace, firms fail to mature, or the state cannot translate decisions into action. Other societies use relatively brief windows to accumulate capabilities that sustain them for decades.
Walt’s warning about strategic quagmires can again be read in reverse. If ignorance, groupthink, one-sided advice, and overconfidence can prevent a country from recognizing that it is heading in the wrong direction, strategic competence must include the ability to re-examine assumptions, listen to inconvenient signals, and change before the costs of error become overwhelming. Recognizing thời therefore means not only knowing when to advance. Sometimes it means recognizing when a particular time has passed and a new time has arrived to take its place bringing with it new pitfalls and new opportunities
This capacity correctly to judge the times becomes especially important during periods of transformation. Many historical failures do not start with a mistaken choice.. A policy or a decision may have been appropriate at the time; a governance model may once have generated momentum; an institution may once have solved a problem specific to the circumstances of that moment. The difficulty begins when interim success is converted into proof that the same choice must remain the correct course of action indefinitely. Experience then hardens into inertia, while inertia then elevates itself into principle.
No model of development is exempt from being so tested. The technological transformation now underway provides one example. AI may allow countries that are below modern performance standards to gain access to knowledge more rapidly, raise productivity, and enter fields that did not previously exist for them. But it may also widen the divide between societies that create technology and those that merely consume it. The thời (existential challenge) of AI in this moment of human history is therefore not about who first adopts chatbots. It is far more about who can convert new technology into human, corporate, and national capabilities while retaining independent judgment.
The same applies to geoeconomics. The fragmentation of trade and technology, strategic chokepoints, supply-chain restructuring, and the desire to diversify production are creating opportunities for Vietnam that might not exist under a different global configuration. But these opportunities will not remain open indefinitely. Other countries can see them as well; technology may alter existing advantages of labor costs; supply chains will eventually establish new equilibria. If Vietnam merely benefits from the relocation decisions of others without using this period to build capabilities of its own, thời will pass before a new Vietnamese thế has been created.
Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời therefore leads us back from external strategy to an internal question: Can Vietnam think far enough ahead, organize action effectively enough, and correct itself quickly enough? Mưu without organization remains an idea; kế without implementation remains talk; thế without internal strength can become a weakness, a liability, to be exploited by others; and thời without an alert and self-confident activist capable of choosing wisely becomes merely an opportunity to be remembered with regret after it has been lost.
Here the remaining elements of P&DOWN begin to come into view: Organizing, Wisdom, and the capacity for self-correction associated with Democratization. But these belong to the larger question of the next Part of this essay: how a political community organizes power, knowledge, and responsibility in order to become an existential activist capable of making its own choices. For present purposes, one principle is enough: a nation’s freedom of choice is not created at the moment when the choice has to be made. It must be firmly anchored in reality long before such moment arrives
If the “curse of geography” is what Vietnam cannot choose, Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời represent the dimensions of power and success in which human agency can operate. Geography gives a location; history gives circumstances; the world may provide opportunities. What future emerges from them remains the responsibility of the Vietnamese themselves.
23. OPENING UP IS NOT A SEARCH FOR THE READY-MADE ROAD
Whenever people stand before a major turning point in their history, there is a natural temptation to search for a model that has already succeeded somewhere else. A road already travelled appears safer than territory for which no map yet exists.
The American poet Robert Frost understood this truth. In his poem he taught us the value of maturely taking charge of our destinies by opening up to possibility:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, whom President John F. Kennedy invited to read at his inauguration when the poet was already well into his eighties, evoked the human hesitation when standing before two diverging paths in an autumn wood. One cannot travel both at once. As one road leads on to another, the chance to return may slip away. Yet many years later, the traveler looks back and recounts how that choice made all the difference. In the context of Opening Up, the poem invites a reflection: maturity means daring to choose amid imperfection and accepting responsibility for the path one has chosen.
Throughout modern Vietnamese history, successive generations have looked outward for answers: to Japanese reform, revolutionary doctrines from Europe, the experiences of the Soviet Union and China, the developmental models of East Asia, Singapore and South Korea, and the democracies of the West.
Each of these searches took place under particular historical conditions, and each left experiences that deserve to be assessed fairly. Ideas that once opened possibilities of liberation may later reveal their limitations; models that generated development in one society cannot simply be transplanted into another. History does not invalidate the value of earlier choices merely because circumstances have changed. But neither does it permit a choice that once possessed value to become an eternal answer.
This may be the most important lesson as Vietnam enters a global configuration whose eventual shape remains uncertain even to the great powers themselves. If the future has not yet taken form, there can be no perfect model waiting for Vietnam at the end of the road. The United States, Europe, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and the Nordic countries each offer achievements as well as problems. Learning from them is necessary; turning any of them into Vietnam’s final blueprint would amount to surrendering the responsibility to think for ourselves.
Opening Up is therefore different from simply opening the door. Opening the door primarily means removing barriers that prevent a society from engaging with the outside world. Opening Up goes further. It requires a society capable of receiving the new without losing its power of judgment, learning from others without becoming their replica, and changing without having to deny everything that has made it what it is.
This perspective also allows the ideological debates of the twentieth century to be viewed from a greater distance. Labels such as “communist,” “capitalist,” “socialist,” and “free market” once divided the world into camps that seemed irreconcilable. In the twenty-first century, the actual workings of societies are far more complicated than those labels suggest. The state can intervene deeply in a market economy; private enterprise can flourish under a system that defines itself as socialist; democracies can also struggle with concentrations of wealth and the influence of money upon politics.
This does not mean that ideology, constitutional arrangements, or political rights have ceased to matter. On the contrary, precisely because labels are insufficient to explain the quality of a society, we must look more closely at its concrete institutions: how power is constrained, how law is applied, how property and opportunity are created, whether citizens can hold those who govern accountable, and whether a system can identify and correct mistakes before they become crises. A society does not become good merely because it gives itself an admirable name.
Seen across the longer span of history, this also calls for a certain humility. Dynasties that once appeared to constitute the durable framework of the nation eventually became chapters of the past; international orders once considered permanent were transformed in turn. There is no reason to assume that any modern political paradigm stands outside this historical condition. The nation outlives every dynasty, and a people outlives every doctrine that has ever claimed to speak in its name.
Recognizing the finitude of political paradigms does not mean waiting for the collapse of any particular system, still less attempting to predict when history will turn. The more useful question is what capabilities a people must develop so that, whatever form change eventually takes, it does not lose the ability to determine its own future. If history teaches anything repeatedly, it is that societies prepared only to preserve what already exists are often those most surprised when existing arrangements can no longer solve new problems.
Opening Up must therefore mean, above all, expanding the field of choice. An economy with more sources of supply is less vulnerable to coercion; a country with more partners has greater diplomatic room; a society with more sources of knowledge and a wider range of voices is better able to detect error early. The same logic links geoeconomics, technology, institutions, and culture: the greater the real capabilities, the greater the number of options; the greater the number of options, the less likely the future will be determined by a single choice from which there is no exit.
Artificial intelligence can be seen in the same light. The ultimate question is not how intelligent machines will become, but whether human beings will retain responsibility for decisions made with their assistance. The more powerful a technology becomes, the more urgent the question of the human subject. If people use AI to enlarge knowledge and judgment, it can become an instrument of Opening Up. If they voluntarily surrender judgment and responsibility to it, a technology of empowerment can become a new form of dependence.
The same is true of nations. A great power may help Vietnam with markets, technology, or security; an international network may create opportunities Vietnam could not generate alone; a doctrine may provide useful concepts with which to understand the world. But partners, networks, and doctrines should expand Vietnam’s capacity to choose, not replace it as the activist making the choices.
Here the image of the Vietnamese “drop of water” returns. The drop cannot command the ocean, nor can it pretend that the great currents do not exist. But neither must it lose its form or its history. Maturity means knowing that one belongs to a world larger than oneself. Opening Up means entering that world with the capacity to receive, connect, and choose without dissolving into it.
The journey from achieving Resilient Continuity to success in Opening Up therefore does not culminate in the discovery of a great highway already laid out by someone else. If the twentieth century repeatedly confronted Vietnamese with the question of which road to follow, the twenty-first century demands a more difficult capability: to examine many roads, to recognize when one has reached its limits, and to be capable of opening a new path when old maps no longer point toward the future; to make its own road across the years to come.
This is where Opening Up ceases to be primarily a question about the external environment and becomes a question about who the Vietnamese are: an object in the hands of others or an empowered playwriter writing and directing a play for history to applaud.
The next Part, therefore, will no longer ask primarily where the world is going. It must ask: What kind of collective activist must the Vietnamese become in order to live in an unknowable future without surrendering to others the right to decide what that future will bring forth.
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REFERENCES — PART IV
Opening Up: Vietnam in a Transforming World
- Nguyễn Trãi, Ức Trai thi tập [Collected Poems of Ức Trai], especially “Bạch Đằng hải khẩu” [At the Bạch Đằng Estuary] — for the line of thought developed in §§18 and 22: “Heaven creates the strategic configuration; human beings make history.”
- Trần Quốc Vượng, Việt Nam, cái nhìn địa-văn hóa [Vietnam: A Geo-Cultural Perspective], Văn hóa Dân tộc Publishing House, Hanoi, 1998. This is an important Vietnamese source for Part IV: the geo-cultural space of Vietnam, the relationship between Vietnam’s particularity and the region and the wider world, and the conceptual basis for the image of “the Vietnamese drop of water in the ocean — and the ocean in the drop.” Vietnamese university catalogues confirm the 1998 edition and Trần Quốc Vượng’s characteristic geo-ecological, geo-humanistic, and geo-historical approach.
- Hoàng Minh Thảo, writings and lectures on Vietnamese military art and strategic thought, particularly the conceptual framework “Mưu – Kế – Thế – Thời” [Strategic Insight – Planning – Strategic Configuration – Timing] — a direct source for §22.
- Lê Hồng Hiệp & Anton Tsvetov (eds.), Vietnam’s Foreign Policy under Doi Moi, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore, 2018.
- Nicholas Chapman, “Vietnamese Foreign Policy in the Post-Doi Moi Era: A Case for Strategic Autonomy,” TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2026. This source relates directly to §21 on strategic autonomy, multilateralization, diversification, and the building of networks of relationships to safeguard sovereignty and preserve room for development.
- ASEAN, ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, 2019 — particularly relevant to the argument against reducing the Indo-Pacific to a binary US–China chessboard, while preserving the importance of connectivity, cooperation, and ASEAN’s role in the regional architecture.
- Marty Natalegawa, Does ASEAN Matter? A View from Within, ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, 2018 — adding a Southeast Asian perspective on the agency of states and regions, rather than viewing the world solely from Washington or Beijing.
- Henry Farrell & Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security, 44(1), 2019, pp. 42–79. One of the new backbone sources for §19: asymmetric networks, hubs, chokepoints, and the capacity to turn interdependence into power.
- Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, Henry Holt, 2023.
- Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa, “The Reshaping of Global Trade as EU, China and US Shift to Enforcement,” Nikkei Asia, September 2026 — a particularly valuable new source for §19: trifurcation, the overlapping of three legal-economic spaces, and the increasingly coercive and geoeconomic character of international trade.
- Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, Harvard University Press, 2016 — on the cross-border fragmentation of production, information technology, and the changing logic of global value chains.
- Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy, W. W. Norton, 2011 — particularly relevant to a question running throughout §§20–23: how far integration can proceed while preserving national policy space and the capacity for choice.
- Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development, Yale University Press, 1958 — a classic source that remains useful for thinking about linkages, bottlenecks, endogenous capacity, and unbalanced development, particularly in the transition from §19 to §20.
- World Bank, Viet Nam 2045: Trading Up in a Changing World – Pathways to a High-Income Future, 2024 — a major empirical source for §20: Vietnam needs to move toward higher-value activities through technology, skills, and innovation rather than remaining satisfied with its present position in global supply chains.
- World Bank, Viet Nam 2045: Breaking Through – Institutions for a High-Income Future, 2025 — focused on institutions rather than value chains. The World Bank emphasizes deeper institutional reform, the legal and regulatory environment, and the effectiveness of public investment.
- Stephen M. Walt, “Top Signs You’re Heading for a Quagmire,” Foreign Policy, September 2026 — relevant to §§20 and 22: ignorance → bad advice → groupthink → overconfidence → prestige. For TĐV, the key issue is not the “quagmire” itself, but the capacity to detect error, cut losses, and self-correct.
- Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, Random House, 2016 — retained for §19, particularly for the shift from territorial geography toward connectivity, without turning “connectography” into a central theory of TĐV.
- Tô Văn Trường, “AI: Nỗi lo của thế giới giàu, cơ hội của Việt Nam?” [“AI: A Concern for the Rich World, an Opportunity for Vietnam?”], 2026. A Vietnamese commentary/case study for §§20 and 23: “move fast, but not blindly,” from the use of AI to the capacity for technological mastery, and ultimately to the question of human judgment. Specific policy claims in the article should be verified against official documents.
- Government of Vietnam, National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence to 2030, with a Vision to 2045, 2026 — a primary source for the discussion of AI. The official policy document is given priority over a second journalistic source on AI.
- Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Future of Power, PublicAffairs, 2011 — providing a broader framework for understanding the changing nature of power in a world where power can no longer be identified solely with territory and military capability.