The importance of India in Vietnam's balancing act with China

In April, just days after formally consolidating Vietnam's two highest offices in his own hands, General Secretary and State President To Lam flew to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping. Three weeks later, he was at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, signing 13 agreements with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

By the time he departed India on May 7, the two countries had elevated their relationship to an Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the highest diplomatic tier India extends to any country, and set a bilateral trade target of $25 billion by 2030. That is a significant upgrade. To understand what it means, one has to first understand what drove To Lam to Beijing.

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Unavoidable neighbours

Three weeks before he landed in New Delhi, To Lam was in Beijing, paying court to Xi Jinping with the dutiful punctuality of a man who understands that certain rituals must be observed regardless of one's private feelings about them. Every newly installed Vietnamese leader makes China their first overseas destination. It is a protocol of sorts.

China has been Vietnam's largest trading partner for over two decades, and their bilateral trade reached 256 billion dollars in 2025. To put that in perspective, that figure exceeds everything Vietnam does commercially with Washington and New Delhi combined. When your neighbour represents that proportion of your economic oxygen, you visit promptly and you smile warmly and you sign railway agreements.

And To Lam signed railway agreements. The Lao Cai-Hanoi-Haiphong line, linking Yunnan Province to northern Vietnam, is moving forward. The "3+3" mechanism, a rather elegantly titled ministerial dialogue across diplomacy, defence, and public security, was deepened. All very productive. All very warm.

All, if one is honest about it, slightly terrifying for anyone in Hanoi who has studied a map. Because here is the thing about very large, very powerful neighbours who also claim most of the sea adjacent to your coastline: proximity is not the same as safety. China seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam in 1974, a military operation that the international community received with roughly the moral urgency of a shrug. In 2014, Beijing dispatched 80 vessels, including warships, to escort a state oil company's drilling rig into Vietnamese-claimed waters.

Eighty Vessels. That was not a diplomatic note. That is a fleet. It took concerted international pressure to move it. As recently as February 2025, Beijing was objecting to Vietnamese construction on the Spratlys, waving the Nine-Dash Line, a cartographic fiction that no international court has ever legitimised — like a man insisting the restaurant is his because he drew it on a napkin in 1947.

The trade relationship is real. The threat is equally real. To Lam understands both, which is why he went to Beijing first and then, with the brisk efficiency of a man who has many more calls to make, came calling on Modi.

The art of the second move

The first move in any negotiation, any relationship, any gambit, is often compelled by circumstance. It is the second move that reveals intention.

To Lam's second move revealed quite a lot.

Thirteen agreements at Hyderabad House. Rare earth cooperation, a pointed hedge against the Chinese stranglehold on those supply chains, no doubt, if you were wondering why that matters. Digital payments innovation between the two central banks. Healthcare regulatory alignment. A sister-city arrangement between Mumbai and Ho Chi Minh City. An academic partnership with Nalanda University.

The defence dimension, always the most consequential, was equally present. Vietnam has expressed strong interest in the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, specifically the shore-based anti-ship variant designed for coastal defence in the South China Sea. The deal is understood to be worth approximately 630 million dollars, encompassing the missiles, training, and long-term logistical support.

The Philippines bought BrahMos in 2022. Vietnam is next. This is not a coincidence; it is a pattern. And the pattern is India becoming the arms supplier of choice for nations that need to defend coastlines against a power that India also, as it happens, shares a contested border with.

India gifted Vietnam a missile corvette in 2023. Both navies run joint exercises. There is a mutual logistics agreement. None of this is an alliance — Vietnam's "Four No's" doctrine precludes alliances, and frankly, Vietnam has earned the right to that doctrine given what happened the last time a foreign power set up military infrastructure on its soil — but it is the kind of relationship that functions like one when it needs to.

What India offers that China cannot

Vietnam's foreign policy is known as bamboo diplomacy. It was articulated by General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in 2016, and draws on a cultural metaphor of resilience and deep roots, a nation that bends in strong winds without breaking, that refuses to align definitively with any single power, regardless of the pressure applied. Its practical expression is diversification: Vietnam has established Comprehensive Strategic

Partnerships with 12 countries, carefully threading partnerships with the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India alongside its structural ties to China. India was among the first three countries to receive that designation.

India has no territorial dispute with Vietnam. It has no Belt and Road infrastructure threading through Vietnamese institutions, no party-to-party ideology to export, no alliance system requiring Hanoi's signature, no end-use restrictions on defence sales that evaporate when Washington's political weather changes. Modi's Act East policy has been consistent in its ask: deeper trade, diversified defence, Vietnam's sovereign capacity to defend itself. That is all. The phrase that circulates among diplomatic analysts — "comfort without coercion" — is not a marketing slogan. It is a description of what India has actually delivered.

Compare this to what China delivers, which is certainty at scale and leverage as a byproduct. Meetings with Xi produce institutional frameworks and concrete commitments. Nobody is questioning Beijing's follow-through. But every deepening of that relationship is also another link in a chain, and chains are useful right up until the moment they are not. The more Vietnam's alternatives narrow, the less international pressure can be generated the next time Chinese warships appear in disputed waters. Bamboo diplomacy — Vietnam's rather poetic term for its non-aligned, diversified foreign policy — only works if the bamboo has roots in more than one soil.

India, alongside Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the United States, is one of those soils. But India is singular among them: it is the one that asks nothing of Vietnam that Vietnam would not freely give. To Lam appeared to reciprocate this week. He stated publicly that Vietnam supports India assuming a greater position and role at multilateral forums. He reaffirmed UNCLOS 1982 as the framework for maritime dispute resolution, a diplomatic sentence that does a great deal of coded work, since UNCLOS is precisely what the Nine-Dash Line violates.

The conclusion

There is a certain air of admiration for countries that survive through elegance rather than force. Vietnam has been doing it for centuries. The Chinese, the Mongols, the French, the Americans—Vietnam outlasted them all through a combination of extraordinary resilience, tactical flexibility, and a talent for knowing exactly when to bend and exactly when to hold firm.

To Lam's two-stop opening, is that same instinct. expressed in diplomatic form. China gets the first visit because geography and economics demand it. India gets the second because sovereignty requires it. The Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the BrahMos discussions, the trade roadmap to $25 billion, the explicit endorsement of India's global role — none of this is theatrics. It is a small country doing what small countries with long memories have always done: cultivating the relationships that give them options, precisely so that the relationship that gives them no options remains manageable.

The bamboo bends. It does not break. And it knows, very precisely, in which direction to lean.