Vietnam’s To Lam is a man in a hurry. Since claiming the nation’s top job, its most powerful leader in decades has been in near-constant motion, pressing flesh and signing deals in Beijing, Washington, Pyongyang and Moscow.
His itinerary, which also included stops in New Delhi, Helsinki, Paris, London and several Southeast Asian capitals, reads less like a diplomatic calendar than a world tour – and analysts say that is precisely the point.
“Where previous leaders practised a restrained, reactive diplomacy, To Lam is positioning Vietnam as a rising middle power with something to say and offer,” Dr Le Hong Hiep, a senior fellow at the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute and coordinator of its Vietnam studies programme, told This Week in Asia.
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“[It is] not merely a country navigating great power competition, but one shaping the terms of its engagement.”
For a nation that has long cultivated the art of strategic diplomatic quietude, bending under pressure and surviving through flexibility, it is a striking evolution.
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But President Lam, also the general secretary of Vietnam’s Communist Party – a dual title held by vanishingly few of the country’s leaders in the modern era – has not altogether abandoned his country’s famed “bamboo diplomacy”.
Instead, analysts say he is reinforcing it with steel.