Vietnam Gives China the Bird

Vietnam is giving the Chinese the middle finger.

Nyugen Tan Dung, the Vietnamese prime minister, said Cam Ranh Bay, 180 miles north west of Ho Chi Minh city, would stand ready to service ships and submarines "from all countries".

Russia is to help rebuild the port as part of an £1.3 billion defence deal signed earlier this year.

The move is one of a series of interlocking regional arrangements that are being put in place to counter China's growing might.

In October, Vietnam signed an agreement giving Indian naval ships base facilities at its ports. India, in turn, agreed to help Hanoi expand its naval logistics capabilities, and to train its army in jungle warfare.

Russia is selling Vietnam a raft of state of the art military hardware, including six submarines and 20 Sukhoi 30 fighters.

The port was used as a naval base for the French forces in Indochina, by the Japanese navy in 1942, by the US Navy during the Vietnam war, and by the Russians during the Cold War.

Beijing and Hanoi have been locked in an increasingly bitter dispute over the oil and gas rich South China Sea.

Observers in the west make a big deal of every little step the United States takes that is contrary to the narrative of China's manifest destiny to be the regional hegemony in the South China Sea. The biggest challenge to China's rise isn't the United States though - it is the activities of everyone else in the region.

The US is playing the part they always play - the reason for all of China's problems. Thanks almost entirely to the actions of the Chinese and the reaction of the other nations within China's sphere of influence, the reality no longer fits that narrative. When I observe the steady stream of events that have set back Chinese ambition during their rise this year, I think the US has become better positioned as not the challenge for China's assent; rather the solution.

We will see how it unfolds, but as I see things - almost every unilateral policy action taken by China this year has backfired except when China works as part of a larger coalition (anti-piracy being one of the few examples). Everyone in the DoD, and many in politics, are so ready to dismiss the CS-21 cooperative approach to security as nothing more than a noble document promoting an ivory tower methodology, and yet the results of an institutionalized approach (ADM Roughead, ADM Keating, and ADM Willard's impact) towards cooperation has changed the expectations and perceptions of power in the Pacific region.

That is not a trivial change. Vietnam could have taken a limited partnership approach with Cam Ranh Bay, but took the broadest cooperative approach instead. Give serious thought to how this move changes the South China Sea geopolitics particularly if a number of nations with an interest in the South China Sea, but not directly in the region (Japan, South Korea, Russia, US, Australia) take Vietnam up on their offer and negotiate agreements.