When Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam stood beside Trump at the White House in February 2026, the photograph captured things far beyond diplomatic pragmatism. There is a political act of memory management where two former enemies, both haunted by the wartime memory, choose partnership despite never addressing the past —a reflection on how history can be suspended when present-day security is too alarming to ignore.
For what it seems, China’s rising power especially in the South China Sea might be the commonly understood reason for this predisposition. China’s mobilization pushes Hanoi toward Washington as their “safety net”, while Washington found Vietnam as a highly useful partner in balancing Beijing. Yet, speaking on strategic interest solely is not enough to explain why two states with such violent shared past can now move in to build trust. Because if strategy alone could overshadow memory, East Asia would look very different today with South Korea and Japan long frictions would have faded long ago. Hence, the fact they have not suggested something deeper is at work, that reconciliation also made out of political and psychological rather than only geopolitical.
How can the United States and Vietnam make their cooperation possible?
Historical trauma does not disappear when strategic realities shift. Collective memory remains embedded in public opinion, national identity, to the limits of what political leaders can safely claim as progress. What looks like rapprochement is therefore better understood as selective forgetting, a negotiated decision to bracket the past without fully confronting it.
The United States carries its own war memory into this relationship. Vietnam was not merely a battlefield, it became a national trauma. What Richard Nixon called the “Vietnam Syndrome” reflected a deep American reluctance to become trapped in another long, costly, and ambiguous war. The fear did not vanish when the cold war ended. It resurfaced in the caution surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. constantly worried about open-ended commitment, weak exit strategies, and another “quagmire”. From normalization in 1995, the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2023 that put the U.S. on par with Beijing and Moscow, to To Lam’s White House visit in 2026, each required Washington to overcome both geopolitical hesitation and their traumatical wartime memory.
Vietnam’s side of the story is no less difficult. They were devastated after the United States dropped more than seven million tonnes of bombs across Indochina, while Agent Orange and dioxin contamination still affect soil, water, and communities near former airbases. Even today, remediation remains incomplete as the legacy of chemical warfare persists in environmental damage and historical injury. Yet, Hanoi in contrast, strengthened their military and diplomatic engagement with Washington, including high level security cooperation and port visits by the U.S. naval assets. Those political decisions later enforce them to live with the pain for the sake of the strategic order but not with addressing the pain.
Their relationship then shall not be romanticized as reconciliation
Both are living in a box of hypocrisy. The United States transformed itself into both the power that lost its longest war and the security partner that Vietnam can hold onto. So does Vietnam, becoming a state that forged in resisting foreign domination while tightening military ties with its former occupier. These identities do not cancel each other out. They remain unresolved, coexist in tension and are kept together by statecraft.
China’s rise then makes the contradiction easier to live with, but not because it solves the historical problem. Beijing’s assertiveness makes the cost of remembering appear higher than the cost of forgetting. Their harassment of Vietnamese survey ships, the militarization of reefs, and the use of militia Vessels that shadow Hanoi’s coast guard emerged as a set of threats that later subordinate Vietnam historical memory with the needs to survive. Reconciliation thus should not be viewed in the diplomatic moral sense, but instead falls as geopolitical compression in which the past is temporarily muted by the demands of the present.
Dynamic here matters since the act of forgetting is never neutral but a product of narratives, institutes, and incentives. In the United States, bipartisan elites have increasingly normalized engagement with Vietnam as part of broader Indo-Pacific strategy. In Vietnam, the Communist Party’s Control over historical narrative, combined with the material benefits of close ties to the U.S., and reduces the political space for confrontation over wartime memory. But the silence is not permanent as veteran networks, environmental advocates, and nationalist voices can still reopen the question of accountability especially when clean up efforts appear insufficient or when security cooperation begins to look like political concession.
The questions neither capital can afford to ask is, what happens if later the shared threat recedes? Maybe a diplomatic breakthrough or a change in Beijing leadership? Would the buried memory reappear as domestic criticism or would it be buried so deep that no one remembers there was ever a wound and finally betrayed the history? The answer will determine whether the relationship of the United States-Vietnam is durable or simply convenient. Though their relationship is real, it rests on a fragile foundation that might only be enough for a short term since they have not resolved their root causes.
