Trump Helped Build Vietnam's Economy. Now, He Might Break It.
A letter from the frontlines of the second cold war
Hanoi is a city of noise. In the Old Quarter, with its narrow streets and crumbling sun-colored French colonial-era buildings, sounds ricochet off every wall. Downtown, hawkers compete with car horns for the attention of passers-by. And everywhere, loudest of all, is the sound of construction. Walk past any corner, and someone seems to be welding or pounding something. Even in the relative quiet of Tây Hồ—a leafy, lakeside community favored among Western expats, where I was based for several months, starting last fall—buildings seem to be going up or coming down at a rate of about 15 a week.
That building boom is, in many ways, thanks to Donald Trump. In 2018, during his first term, Trump kicked off a trade war with China that helped fuel a manufacturing boom in Vietnam, where investors poured money into projects aimed at replacing Chinese suppliers to the United States. More than half of all the foreign investment that has entered Vietnam since it opened its economy in the 1980s came in the six years between 2017 and 2023—about $248.3 billion, according to Le Hong Hiep of the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. By the time Trump returned to office this January, exports to the US accounted for nearly a third of Vietnam’s entire GDP, up from about a fifth in 2017.
Today, though, Trump is poised to crush this boom just as quickly as he launched it. Fifty years after America pulled out of Saigon, closing a chapter in the first Cold War, Vietnam has become a battlefield in a second cold war, this one between Washington and Beijing. Hanoi, according to Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, is no more than a “colony of Communist China.” Navarro alleges that Vietnam acts as a conduit for Chinese exports to America, a place that offers “Made in Vietnam” labels for evading US tariffs—an illicit practice known as transshipment. Hanoi has taken steps to crack down on the practice, but it also wants to avoid angering Beijing, its primary trading partner. All of this places Hanoi at risk of alienating both sides, triggering economic retaliation from Beijing and massive tariffs from Washington.
Last month, as I boarded a flight from Vietnam to the United States, what struck me most was how a country of 100 million people—more than Italy and Canada combined—could find its economy upended at the whim of someone wielding a pen in Washington. Of course, similar things happen to lots of countries that are threatened with tariffs or other punishment from the Trump White House; millions of laborers put in work at a factory one day only to get sent home the next. Seen from Hanoi, though, the phenomenon felt especially direct, personal, and disturbing.
After 1975, when the last US soldier left Saigon, what began as a bitter, two-decade-long trade embargo gave way to a growing economic and diplomatic closeness. Stick to the front pages, and you may have missed this evolution. I certainly had. Growing up in the 90s in Midwest America, I associated Vietnam mostly with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock—reverb exploding like bombs throughout his Star Spangled Banner—or with the Pulitzer-winning photo of the “napalm girl.” It was disorienting for me to arrive in Hanoi at the end of 2024 and be greeted by swarms of young people eager to practice their conversational English, ambitious about business and inquisitive about life in America. This warm reception felt like a testament to the power of careful diplomacy.
The Trump administration, apparently, felt differently. Within hours of his inauguration, President Trump began unraveling programs that had helped to heal old wounds between the US and Vietnam.