China Threat

US navy carrier's Vietnam visit signals closer ties amid China tensions
By Bennett Murray in Da Nang

A child wears a US navy hat during a visit by sailors to Da Nang SOS Children’s Village. 

Thousands of sailors from a US navy carrier and two escort vessels have taken part in a charm offensive while on a port call to the Vietnamese coastal city of Da Nang, in the largest US troop presence in the country since the war ended in 1975.
In a classroom on the outskirts of the city, uniformed navy sailors played rock and country classics for dozens of enthralled children who had disabilities that have been blamed on the Agent Orange sprayed by the US military during the war. 

After the performance, more sailors arrived for some arts and crafts.
Cooks from the USS Carl Vinson visited local restaurants to learn Vietnamese recipes, and the US naval band performed songs from the war-era Vietnamese composer Trinh Cong Son.
Dignitaries from both the US navy and the Vietnamese government lauded the visit as a sign of budding friendship between the two former foes, but looming over the fun, lighthearted atmosphere of the week was the question of China. 

Although geopolitical issues were largely left unspoken, analysts said the trip largely stemmed from anxieties over a millennia-old rivalry between Vietnam and its northern neighbour.
Nguyen Chi Tuyen, a dissident blogger from Hanoi also known by his pen name Anh Chi, said the Vietnamese people welcomed US military engagement with “our hearts and minds”.
He said opposition to China was deeply embedded in Vietnam’s national identity, with the South China Sea dispute only the most recent in a line of conflicts stretching back to China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in the third century BC.
China claims almost all the South China Sea, including waters internationally recognised as Vietnam’s. 

The two countries fought a series of bloody skirmishes over the sea’s islands in the 1970s and 80s, with the last occurring in 1988.
Tuyen is no fan Vietnam’s single-party communist state, which bans dissent. 

He has been arrested several times and was once beaten by thugs working for the secret police.
But he said most anti-government activists supported the Carl Vinson’s arrival. 

They also want American arms sales to Vietnam, which were legalised in 2016 when Barack Obama lifted a weapons embargo that had been in place since the war.
Tuyen said that shortly before the embargo was lifted, Senator John McCain, a longtime advocate of close bilateral ties, asked him and three other dissidents at a private meeting in Hanoi whether the move would damage the human rights situation in Vietnam. 

All four told McCain the US should go through with sales, said Tuyen.
“We know about the threat that if the US government lifts the ban, they can use them against the activists and the people,” he said. 

“But we think it is much more important than our own security that if the US government lifts the ban, Vietnam … can use the weapons to defend our own country.”
Carl Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales and an expert on south-east Asia, said the Vietnamese government considered the Carl Vinson’s docking to be a balancing act between powers.
“The visit of the USS Carl Vinson does not signal that Vietnam is moving into the US orbit to oppose China. It signals that as trust has developed between Vietnam and the United States, the leaders in Hanoi are comfortable with a step up in naval engagement with the United States,” he said.
But Le Dang Doanh, a former economic adviser to the government and a Communist party member, said Hanoi felt its hand was being forced. 

“It is Beijing that has pushed Vietnam closer to the US more than Washington has come closer to Vietnam.”
He said he was anxious about whether the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who recently changed China’s constitution to abolish term limits, would use force against Vietnam as a show of strength. China’s former leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the 1979 invasion of Vietnam shortly after consolidating power, Doanh pointed out.
“I don’t know how Xi Jinping will demonstrate his power, we need to pay high attention,” he said.
Would Vietnam would ever abandon its non-alignment policy and become a US ally? 

“It’s not sure [if there could be an alliance], but it’s certainly not their last visit,” said Doanh.

Chinese Expansionism

China unhappy over US carrier visit to VietnamBy CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
A Vietnamese passenger boat sails past U.S aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson as it docks in Danang bay, Vietnam on Monday, March 5, 2018. For the first time since the Vietnam War, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier is paying a visit to a Vietnamese port, seeking to bolster both countries' efforts to stem expansionism by China in the South China Sea. 

Beijing is unhappy with the first visit by a U.S. aircraft carrier to a Vietnamese port since the Vietnam War and is monitoring developments, a Communist Party newspaper said Wednesday.
However, the Global Times said the USS Carl Vinson's visit was unlikely to alter the balance of power in the South China Sea, which China claims virtually in its entirety and has been fortifying with military structures on man-made islands.
"China's vigilance and unhappiness are inevitable, but we don't think that the USS Carl Vinson's Vietnam trip can stir up troubles in the South China Sea," the paper known for its hard-line nationalist views said in an editorial.
The visit "will not generate any special tools to pressure China," while the U.S. sending warships to the South China Sea will "only waste money," the paper said.
Vietnam and China have extensive overlapping claims to islands and resources in the sea, and U.S. officials say the port call is a sign of the U.S. commitment to the region and U.S.-Vietnam ties.
"Carl Vinson being here, me being here, this is about Vietnam. This is about our relationship with Vietnam, both from a military relationship and from a comprehensive partnership relationship," Vice Adm. Phillip Sawyer, commander of the U.S. 7th Fleet, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday from the Vietnamese port of Da Nang, where the ship docked Monday.
Sawyer and other officials have not linked the ship's visit to China's activities in the South China Sea, but he did note Washington's concerns over China's moves to put teeth behind its territorial claims and unanswered questions about China's purpose in its rapid military expansion and upgrading.
"My view on that is both those, land reclamation and the militarization, cause angst within the region. And the angst that it causes is really because of lack of transparency," Sawyer said.
"It's not quite clear what's going to happen down there. And I think that angst and that lack of transparency is potentially disruptive to the security and stability of the region. And that, that causes concern," he said.
The visit by the USS Carl Vinson with more than 5,000 crewmembers marks the largest U.S. military presence in Vietnam since the Southeast Asian nation was unified under Communist leadership after the war ended in 1975.
Accompanied by a cruiser and a destroyer, the ship is visiting as China completes work on air bases, radar stations and other infrastructure that could prove key in a military conflict in the Paracel islands and seven artificial islands in the Spratlys in maritime territory also claimed by Vietnam.
The ship's mission includes technical exchanges, sports matches and visits to an orphanage and a center for victims of Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant sprayed by U.S. forces to deny cover for Communist fighters during the war. 

It marks a fine-tuning, rather than a turning point, in relations. 

The U.S. Navy has staged activities in Vietnam for its Pacific Partnership humanitarian and civic missions in nine of the past 12 years.
Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan also claim waters and islands in the South China Sea that China says belong to it.

Sina Delenda Est

US aircraft carrier to dock in Vietnam for first time since 1975 amid tension over China’s rising sea power
By Nicola Smith, in Taipei and Danielle Demetriou, in Tokyo

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to dock in the Vietnamese coastal city of Danang in March.

The US navy is to dock in the Vietnamese coastal city of Danang in March, in the first visit of an American aircraft carrier to the country since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
The USS Carl Vinson will arrive in Vietnam during the navy’s multinational disaster response exercises in the Indo-Pacific region, but its presence is also being widely perceived as an attempt to counter China’s military influence in Asian waters, where the East and South China Seas are the scenes of escalating territorial disputes.
Vietnam, which borders China, has long resisted its power and influence, but Beijing’s insistence that it controls almost all of the South China Sea has threatened competing territorial claims, including from Hanoi.
China’s assertion has also challenged US naval supremacy in the western Pacific, prompting Washington to attempt to woo Asian allies with the idea of closer military ties.
US aircraft carriers were a common sight off the coast of Vietnam in 1960s and 1970s, during the war. Relations between the two nations were normalised in 1995 and Washington lifted an embargo on weapons sales to Hanoi in 2016.

The news comes as the Japanese government is reportedly considering the deployment of surface-to-ship missile units across southern Okinawa to counter China’s rising maritime powers.
Officials are exploring plans to deploy a unit on the main Okinawa island in addition to other smaller islands in the region, with a view to bolstering its defences against Chinese vessels, government sources told Japanese media.
The deployment plans, which are expected to be detailed in the new National Defence Guidelines to be drafted by the end of the year, reportedly focus on advanced Type 12 surface-to-ship missiles with a range of more than 62 miles.
There are reportedly plans to install missile units on both Okinawa island and the smaller island Miyakojima, which would ensure that they can cover the strategically-located Miyako Strait which runs between them.
An administrative command centre was also likely to be set up on Okinawa’s main island to manage surface-to-missile units deployed across the region, according to Kyodo news agency.
The Miyako Strait in the East China Sea has emerged as a regional hotspot of tension, with Chinese naval vessels regularly fuelling tensions by passing through its waters every year over the past decade.
Miyako island also lies to the southeast of a disputed group of islands in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, which emerged as a growing source of bilateral tension between the two nations.
Reports of the missile unit deployments coincide with a growing number of incidents involving increasingly assertive Chinese vessels venturing into waters close to the disputed islands.
Last week, three Chinese patrol ships reportedly entered Japanese territorial waters near the disputed islands, while last month, the Japanese government confirmed that a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine also had sailed around them.