Free Asia's Cauldron by Robert D. Kaplan

chairman, was blunt: “U.S. presence is needed for a free maritime climate in the South China Sea.”
    A de facto American-Vietnamese strategic partnership was, in effect, announced as far back as July 2010 at an ASEAN Regional Forum meeting in Hanoi, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the United States has a “national interest” in the South China Sea, that the United States is ready to participate in multilateral efforts to resolve South China Sea territorial disputes, and that maritime claims should be based on land features: that is, on the extension of continental shelves, a concept violated by China’s historic dashed line or cow’s tongue. Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi called Clinton’s remarks “virtually an attack on China.” Americanofficials basically shrugged off Yang’s comments. There was probably no better indication of just how close Washington had moved toward Vietnam than the initialing three months earlier of a civilian nuclear power deal that will theoretically allow American firms to help build atomic energy plants here.
    The fact is, no country is as threatened by China’s rise as much as Vietnam. Take the Vietnamese approach to ASEAN. Though the Vietnamese would like ASEAN to be stronger, in order to be a counterweight to China, they are realistic, they told me. They know that the very puissance of nationalism in Asia—as opposed to postnationalism for so many decades in Europe—inhibits the integration of ASEAN’s member states. “ASEAN is not even a customs union—which makes it a very low level trading bloc,” one official explained. In the plush, red-cushioned elegance of the Foreign Ministry, with its glittering tea sets and oriental-French decor, I was repeatedly counseled on Chinese grand strategy, which is, according to the Vietnamese, to postpone all multilateral discussions with ASEAN of South China Sea disputes while Beijing gets stronger militarily, and, in the meantime, to extract concessions from individual Southeast Asian nations through bilateral negotiations—divide and conquer, in other words. China’s navy, Vietnamese defense officials told me, is already larger than those of all the ASEAN countries combined.
    But Vietnam is by no means estranged from China and in the arms of the United States. Vietnam is too dependent on (and interconnected with) China for that. As Australian expert Carlyle Thayer explains, Vietnamese-Chinese military ties have developed alongside Vietnamese-American ones. 14 While the United States is Vietnam’s largest export market, Vietnam imports more goods from China than from any other country—cotton, machines, fertilizer, pesticide, electronics, leather, a host of other consumer items, you name it. The economy here simply couldn’t function without China, even as China, by flooding Vietnam with cheap products, impedes the growth of local manufacturing. Furthermore, Vietnamese officials are impressed with the geographical asymmetry of their situation: as they say,
a distant water can’t put out a nearby fire
. China’s proximity and thefact that the United States is half a world away means that the Vietnamese have to put up with an indignity such as the environmental destruction that comes with Chinese bauxite mining of Vietnam’s lush Central Highlands, a project that like others around the country employs Chinese workers rather than Vietnamese ones. “We can’t relocate, statistically we’re one province of China,” Nguyen Tam Chien, a former deputy foreign minister, told me.
    Because of the failure of the Soviet Union to help Vietnam in 1979, the Vietnamese will never again fully trust a faraway power. Beyond geography, the Vietnamese at a certain fundamental level distrust the United States. One official told me simply that the United States is in decline, a condition made worse, he claimed, by Washington’s