Vietnam isn’t rising—it’s being repositioned. Behind the promise of trade lies the old imperial game: extract, discipline, discard. What’s called opportunity is just recolonization with better branding.

By Weaponized Information
April 12, 2025

Vietnam is being played.

In a recent South China Morning Post op-ed, we’re told Vietnam sees economic opportunity in Trump’s return to tariff politics. With U.S.-China tensions escalating, Hanoi believes it can carve out a strategic advantage. But this optimism ignores history, power, and reality.

Beneath the surface, the U.S. isn’t looking for partners—it’s looking for pawns. And Vietnam is dangerously close to becoming one.

Washington’s Favorite Proxy (This Week)

Trump’s so-called economic nationalism is not anti-imperialist. It is imperialism rebranded for domestic consumption. It’s not about restoring industry—it’s about reasserting U.S. control over global production networks as China’s influence grows. For Vietnam to see this as an opening is to misread the moment entirely.

The U.S. has no interest in Vietnamese prosperity. It wants leverage. It wants pliable supply chains, cheap labor, and a buffer zone against Beijing. When Vietnam no longer serves those ends, it will be dropped—just like so many before it.

Monopoly Capital Doesn’t Build Nations—It Extracts Value

Vietnam imagines it can exploit the U.S.-China contradiction to its benefit. But what it is actually doing is stepping deeper into the global system of dependency dominated by monopoly finance capital. What is being offered is not partnership in production—but a role in a colonial assembly line.

The patents will remain in Silicon Valley. The pricing decisions will be made in New York. The surplus value will flow into hedge funds. Vietnam will get the warehouses, the contract jobs, and the political instability.

From National Liberation to Logistic Dependency

There is bitter irony here. Vietnam, the country that once humiliated U.S. military might in the name of national liberation, is now volunteering to join its economic machine. The same empire that dropped Agent Orange on its forests is now welcomed as a trade benefactor.

This is not development. This is strategic retreat into a new form of dependency. It is the recolonization of sovereignty through logistics.

The Colonial Contradiction Revisited

The deeper Vietnam integrates into U.S. trade architecture, the more it loses its ability to chart an independent course. Every Free Trade Agreement signed, every export platform expanded, every trade surplus with the U.S. turns into another leash.

Washington doesn’t want strong allies. It wants dependent subcontractors. That is the heart of the colonial contradiction in the 21st century: economic integration without sovereignty.

What Would Real Sovereignty Look Like?

It would mean:

• Refusing to serve as a logistics appendage for decaying empires.
• Building deeper regional alliances with Global South states resisting U.S. dominance.
• National industrial policy rooted in self-reliance, not export dependency.
• Breaking with institutions like the IMF and World Bank that have disciplined Vietnam since the 1990s.

Sovereignty begins with breaking the illusion that alignment with imperialism can ever be strategic. The U.S. does not offer strategy—it offers subordination.

The Empire Does Not Share Power. It Extracts It.

Vietnam is not being invited into a win-win scenario. It is being offered a place at the imperial banquet—as meat.

The “benefits” of Trump’s protectionism are fleeting. What lasts is the infrastructure of dependency being rebuilt beneath the surface: the legal agreements, the trade ties, the geopolitical alignments that lock countries like Vietnam into a world-system they cannot control.

If Vietnam continues on this path, it will not become a power in its own right. It will become a cog in someone else’s collapsing machine.

Vietnam must choose: become a subcontractor to empire—or reclaim the revolutionary path it once blazed.