Vietnam and India reshape middle power diplomacy

To Lam’s visit to New Delhi in May 2026 marked a shift in India–Vietnam relations, with the Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership framing the relationship less around regional balancing than coordinated national development. Backed by rising trade, investment commitments and new defence cooperation mechanisms, the partnership reflects a growing model of developmental diplomacy driven by shared strategic direction and complementary economic strengths. State visits rarely reshape international order, but they can illuminate deeper changes already underway. To Lam’s visit to New Delhi in May 2026, the first by a Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary since 2013, was such a moment in Vietnam–India relations. The Joint Statement on the Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (ECSP) that emerged from the visit formalised a relationship increasingly defined less by shared anxieties about China than by shared ambitions for national development. The standard framing of Vietnam–India ties emphasises geopolitics: mutual distrust of Chinese assertiveness, commitment to ‘strategic autonomy’ and support for freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. While partly accurate, this account is insufficient. It reduces a maturing partnership to reactive balancing, when the more consequential story is about proactive cooperation. Bilateral trade reached almost US$16.5 billion in 2025, with the two governments now targeting US$25 billion by 2030. Vietnamese car manufacturer VinFast announced a US$2 billion electric vehicle investment in Tamil Nadu, alongside Vingroup’s Memorandum of Understanding for a planned US$3 billion multi-sector project in Telangana. These developments signal a partnership driven by industrial complementarity, not merely threat perception. This is developmental diplomacy: the use of external partnerships to advance domestic transformation agendas. Both Vietnam and India now have explicit long-term national objectives, including Vietnam’s goal of achieving high-income status by 2045 and India’s Viksit Bharat vision of becoming a developed nation by 2047. These are strategic compasses that orient international negotiations. A November 2024 joint conference in Hanoi, co-organised by the Indian Embassy and the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics, mapped the bilateral relationship onto these timelines, suggesting that the framework has moved from rhetoric to policy. The two economies have complementary strengths. Vietnam offers an export-disciplined manufacturing platform, increasingly demanding high-value technological inputs and seeking more diversified markets. Its digital economy reached approximately US$45 billion in 2025, growing at around 20 per cent year-on-year — the fastest in Southeast Asia. India brings strengths in pharmaceuticals, IT services, space technology and a growing defence industrial capacity. On defence, Vietnam has formally conveyed interest in acquiring BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles from India, with a potential package valued at approximately US$629 million under negotiation. India has offered maintenance, repair and overhaul support for Vietnam’s Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets and Kilo-class submarines, embedding New Delhi more deeply into Hanoi’s defence maintenance architecture. These transactions demonstrate an increasing convergence in India and Vietnam’s developmental and security imperatives. The ECSP institutionalises this convergence through new mechanisms — a 2+2 Strategic Diplomacy–Defence Dialogue and Vietnam’s accession to India’s Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, with explicit synergies to the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. Thirteen cooperation agreements spanning digital technology, cybersecurity, pharmaceuticals and rare earths were signed during the visit. The partnership also operates within a broader regional architecture that both countries seek to influence. The 2024–2028 Plan of Action for the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, signed during then-prime minister Pham Minh Chinh’s 2024 visit to India, commits both sides to strengthening Indo-Pacific cooperation based on international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Vietnam expressed support for India’s bid for permanent membership of a reformed UN Security Council. Both nations reaffirmed ASEAN centrality. These mutual reinforcements reflect a shared normative preference for a regional order in which medium-sized states retain meaningful agency — a preference that aligns with, but extends beyond, traditional ‘hedging’ frameworks in middle-power literature. Rather than merely avoiding entrapment in great-power competition, Vietnam and India appear to be practising what might be called ‘co-shaping’. Through deeper bilateral ties, they are generating institutional precedents and economic linkages that widen autonomous space for themselves and other developing states. Yet there are limitations to this approach. Despite strong trade linkages, growing trade imbalances risk generating friction, with Vietnam recording a US$4.2 billion surplus with India in 2025. India’s investment in Vietnam, estimated around US$2 billion, remains modest relative to stated ambitions. Digital economy cooperation lacks the regulatory alignment needed for operational scale. Institutional enthusiasm has consistently outrun implementation — a gap that the ECSP’s new delivery mechanisms must address. The architecture of the relationship is now mature. What it requires is execution: concrete agreements on semiconductor supply chains, fintech connectivity, energy-transition financing and the ongoing ASEAN–India trade agreement review. While great powers increasingly set the terms of regional order, Vietnam and India are demonstrating that those terms are not immutable. Two countries whose combined population exceeds 1.5 billion, whose economic trajectories are among the most dynamic in the world and whose institutional relationship has achieved real density have more structural leverage than conventional accounts of middle powers typically suggest. The question that To Lam’s visit poses is whether that leverage can be translated from strategic concept into developmental reality. By Do Khuong Manh Linh – Eastasiaforum.org – June 4, 2026

Related posts:

1. India-Vietnam meeting discusses China’s destabilising actions In recent years, Vietnam has often turned to India for...
2. Rethinking India’s economic policy towards Vietnam Since the upgrade of bilateral relations to a ‘Comprehensive Strategic...
3. Speaker Om Birla-led delegation to Vietnam holds bilateral talks Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, who is leading a 13-member...