How did Vietnam become friends with everyone?

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This is the script for my video posted on May 18, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Vietnam is the only country on Earth that has top-tier strategic partnerships with China, Russia, the United States, Britain, and France. That’s all five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus many more like India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. All of these countries view Vietnam as a strategic partner, even if they don’t get along very well with Vietnam’s other allies. So how did Vietnam become so universally attractive to other countries?

The explanation really starts in the mid-19th century, when Vietnam was ruled by the Nguyen dynasty. The state was a tributary of Qing dynasty China, but it still had full internal autonomy, and the country had been experiencing serious crises in the form of peasant revolts, regional warlordism, and fighting between Catholics and Confucians. In 1858, a fleet of French and Spanish ships shelled the city of Da Nang ostensibly to avenge the execution of Catholic missionaries who had been proselytizing there. This is generally considered the beginning of France’s colonial conquest.

By 1887, France had welded the country’s regions together to form the Union Indochinoise. The southern part of the country, called Cochinchina, was a direct colony, while Annam in the center and Tonkin in the north were protectorates, in addition to Cambodia and Laos. This three region split was not a French invention, but France leaned into it. They governed each region very differently, producing elites with different languages, religions, and class structures, and you can still see the impact of this today. Ho Chi Minh City has a francophone, Catholic, and mercantile inheritance that Hanoi does not.

France built a system designed to extract as much money as possible from the region. The colonial budget in Vietnam was built on three monopolies: opium, salt, and alcohol. At its peak, opium revenue alone covered roughly a third of the administration’s spending. Michelin and Terres Rouges turned the trees of the highlands into rubber. The Mekong became a rice machine, exporting at industrial scale while Vietnamese peasants lost their land. The French turned Vietnam into a factory they could exploit, and in the process they also built the Vietnamese national movement.

Perhaps the worst decision France made was to destroy the civil service examination system that traditionally selected government officials based on their mastery of Confucian classics and classical literature. This happened by 1919, and it effectively removed the upward career path for the country’s scholars. Many turned to nationalism, then to communism, and in 1930 the country’s disparate communist factions were merged into what would become the Indochinese Communist Party. That same month, non-communist nationalist Vietnamese soldiers and civilians committed a mutiny against local French officers at the Yen Bai garrison in the country’s far north, and France responded by bombing a civilian village and guillotining the mutiny’s leaders.

Meanwhile, peasants were rising up against the French across the country, and with the non-communist alternative literally decapitated, the communist nationalists became the only option. During WWII, the French government was replaced with a Vichy France that was friendly to the Axis Powers, and when Japan invaded Vietnam, Vichy France continued to administer it. During this period of double colonization, Japan used Vietnam to fuel its empire, American bombing cut the rail lines that moved southern rice north, a typhoon hit, and the result was the Great Famine.

From October 1944 to mid-1945, one to two million Vietnamese people died of starvation, largely in the north of the country. The communist Viet Minh organized raids on rice granaries and ended up being the only authority that actually fed people. When Ho Chi Minh declared independence after Japan’s surrender, he quoted the American declaration of independence in front of American intelligence officers who had trained and armed his fighters. There was no other political entity in the country, be it French, imperial, or Japanese, with the legitimacy required to rule, and the communists took power.

Of course, the French weren’t going to just let that slide. After the war, France tried to reconquer Vietnam, but the Viet Minh fought back. By 1954, amid fears of communist ideology spreading, the US was funding about 80% of the French war effort. In May of that year, the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, and it so happened that the Geneva Conference, which was scheduled to settle outstanding issues from the recent Korean and Indochina wars, began the next day.

In Geneva, the parties agreed to form a temporary partition at the 17th parallel, as well as a 300-day grace period for population movement across this line. With help from US Navy ships, nearly a million Vietnamese moved south, mostly Catholics, and these refugees became the demographic base for the ruling regime out of Saigon, often butting heads with the Buddhists who already lived there. By 1965, Vietnam became a US war, and ten years later the war ended with millions dead and roughly 800k tons of unexploded ordnance across the landscape.

The post-war period was not easy. There was forced re-education of non-communists, over a million people fled the country, and Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 to overthrow the ruling Khmer Rouge. In retribution, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops invaded Vietnam in the Sino-Vietnamese War.

But in 1986, a reset came. The Vietnamese Sixth Party Congress launched Doi Moi, a series of reforms inspired partially by China’s recent structural changes. They enacted market socialism, foreign investment, and decollectivized agriculture. They returned land use rights to peasant households. Vietnam’s poverty rate went from 58% in 1993 to under 5% by 2020. In the mid 1990s, the US lifted its embargo and normalized relations.

Vietnam has been occupied by France, Japan, the US, and China, all within living memory of its current class of leadership. The lesson the Vietnamese government has learned is that it needs to be flexible, and this is best exemplified in the doctrine now called bamboo diplomacy. By being firm yet adaptive, Vietnam can thrive regardless of what’s going on in the world, and a core element of this is it diversifying its interests across basically every major foreign competitor, sometimes playing them against one another. Vietnam can be friends with Russia, China, the US, Britain, and France all at the same time and in spite of their own historical challenges. It can be friends with everyone but beholden to no one, and all of this is rooted in hundreds of years of having to be practical.

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