Over the past thirty years, trade cooperation has been the cornerstone of the Vietnam–U.S. relationship. To move further forward, both sides need to shift from being trade partners to becoming development partners. The first time I met an American was back in 1995. A young backpacker had gotten lost in my district—a rural area with little to offer in terms of tourism. At that time, very few people spoke English. Fortunately, a neighbor who had just completed a basic English course had enough vocabulary to give her directions. The traveler thanked her before bidding farewell to the curious crowd and most of the people there had seen a “foreigner” for the first time in their lives. That year, when Vietnam and the United States had just normalized diplomatic ties, she was one of more than 57,000 Americans who visited the country. Thirty years later, in 2024, that number had grown fourteenfold to 780,000. That remarkable transformation is not merely a story of tourism—it reflects a profound shift in the relationship between the two nations that once stood on opposite sides of the battlefield. Since 1995, U.S.–Vietnam relations have made remarkable strides, particularly in trade cooperation. Bilateral trade volume surged from […]