"Vietnam Wants U.S. Help at Sea and Chinese Help at Home" - by CWP alum Isaac Kardon
Over the past four years, the Biden administration has invested significantly in expanding and deepening the U.S. defense relationship with Vietnam. These efforts reached new formal heights during President Joe Biden’s state visit to Hanoi in September 2023, when the two countries inaugurated a comprehensive strategic partnership.
For the United States, pursuing defense cooperation with Vietnam has been an important way to act on “shared security interests” in the Indo-Pacific—especially countering Chinese activity in contested maritime areas. This emphasis was clear during a meeting between Biden and Vietnamese Communist Party general secretary To Lam in New York last September: The leaders discussed “working together to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific” and “reaffirmed the importance of maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific—especially in the South China Sea.”
Washington shouldn’t overestimate its influence in Hanoi.
By Sheena Chestnut Greitens and Isaac B. Kardon, a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Isaac B. Kardon, Ph.D., (孔适海博士) is a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is concurrently adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and was formerly assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), where he served as a research faculty member in the China Maritime Studies Institute.
Isaac’s research centers on the People’s Republic of China’s maritime power, with specialization in maritime disputes and the international law of the sea, Chinese global port development, China-Pakistan relations, and the People’s Liberation Army’s overseas basing. His writing appears in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Naval War College Review, as well as other scholarly and policy publications. Isaac’s book, China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order (Yale, 2023) analyzes whether and how China is “making the rules” of regional and global order.
At Carnegie, Isaac is building on his foundation of research on China in the maritime domain to explore China’s role in the wider global commons. High seas, deep seabed, polar regions, and orbital space are among the “strategic frontier issues” prioritized by China’s leadership—and thus key sites to observe China’s interests in and influence on vital global rules, norms, and standards. China’s interest in leading the nascent regime for deep sea mining is a particular area of research focus. He is also continuing “past the pier” on his existing stream of research on PRC ports to further study China’s development of transport and communications infrastructure networks with dual civilian and military functions.
Isaac earned a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University, an M.Phil in modern Chinese studies from Oxford University, and a B.A. in history from Dartmouth College. He was a China & the World post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, and has held visiting appointments at NYU School of Law, Academia Sinica, and the PRC National Institute for South China Sea Studies. He studied Chinese (Mandarin) at Peking University, Tsinghua University, Hainan University, and National Taiwan Normal University.
Photo Credit: By Truyền hình Đà Nẵng I DaNangTV, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125152106
