The announcement of a "Comprehensive Strategic Partnership" between Brussels and Hanoi last week places the EU side by side with China, the United States, and Russia as one of Vietnam's top-tier diplomatic relationships.
Vietnamese President Luong Cuong described it as a "historical milestone underlining the great achievements that the two sides have made," during a meeting with the head of the European Council, Antonio Costa, in Hanoi.
Costa pointed out that the new partnership "highlights the importance we attach to the region and to Vietnam's growing role."
"At a moment when the international rules-based order is under threat from multiple sides, we need to start to stand side by side as reliable and predictable partners," Costa added.
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The European Council chaired by Costa is composed of the top leaders of the European Union countries, as well as the head of the European Commission.
EU late to Vietnam's party
Costa was welcomed by top Vietnamese politicians after arriving in the country on January 29 and becoming one of the first foreign leaders to meet Communist Party chief To Lam since Lam was re-elected earlier in January.
"The European Union is committed to strengthening and deepening its ties with Vietnam," Costa said in a press statement, invoking "shared values and mutual goals."
"For 35 years, our partnership has grown in depth and ambition," he added.
The EU's increasingly close relationship with the Communist-ruled Vietnam hinges on trade — Vietnam is now the bloc's largest trading partner in Southeast Asia. Bilateral trade surged by roughly 50% between 2019 and 2024 to reach the volume of €67 billion ($79 billion). The available data for the first 10 months of 2025 indicates even more growth — an 8.4% rise year-on-year.
However, it is worth noting that the EU only established its "Comprehensive Strategic Partnership" after its geopolitical rivals China and Russia and its increasingly erratic ally the US all did the same. Other nations, like Japan and Singapore, have also beaten Brussels to the punch.
These partnerships are part of a deliberate strategy by Vietnam to diversify and balance its diplomatic ties and avoid becoming too dependent on any single center of power. The US is Hanoi's largest export market, China is a close partner due to both cultural and political ties between the two Communist parties despite the dispute in the South China Sea, and Russia is an essential weapons supplier.
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"For the EU, it is not only symbolically important that the relationship now formally reaches the same level as Vietnam's ties with China, the United States, or Japan. This status also opens up more opportunities for regular dialogue and exchange to further strengthen the relationship," Alfred Gerstl, an expert on Indo-Pacific international relations at the University of Vienna, told DW.
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"Both sides have a shared interest in shoring up a rules-based trading system at a moment when Washington is openly disrupting it, so the timing is telling," Khac Giang Nguyen, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, told DW.
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For Hanoi, he added, it also continues a broader diversification push by stacking up "comprehensive strategic" labels to widen its room for manoeuver, with Hanoi doubling down on what it calls "bamboo diplomacy" as a shorthand for flexibility and independence.
Vietnam's politics still a flashpoint
The joint EU-Vietnam statement adopted on Thursday sketches an agenda that goes well beyond trade volumes — both sides have pledged to explore cooperation in areas including critical raw materials, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, transport and "secure and trusted communications infrastructure," while also stepping up work on supply-chain resilience, security, and defense.
"The baseline trajectory is stable improvement in trade and investment, because the economic logic is strong and the relationship has institutional ballast. The main recurring friction point is politics," Giang said.
A lot of this friction is generated by Vietnam's government oppressing critics inside the country. As part of the EU-Vietnam free trade deal, which entered into force in 2020, Vietnam's government was expected to legalize independent trade unions. However, rights groups and labor experts say genuinely independent unions still do not operate freely, and the ruling Communist Party has actually ramped up its repression of critics since To Lam first came to power in 2024.
The leaked Directive 24, written by the Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 2023, claimed that "hostile and reactionary forces have thoroughly taken advantage of the international integration process to increase their sabotage and internal political transformation activities … forming 'civil society' alliances and networks, 'independent trade unions,'… creating the premise for the formation of domestic political opposition groups,"
Bill Hayton, associate fellow at Chatham House's Asia-Pacific Programme, told DW that Vietnam likely thinks that through this elevation of relations, "it has neutralized the EU's attempts to try to change its political system."
"Hanoi must think there will be less pressure from Brussels to increase the space for civil society, for example," he said.
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Another major point of contention between Brussels and Hanoi is Vietnam's stance on Russia and the Ukraine invasion. During his Hanoi visit, Costa acknowledged that the EU and Vietnam don't see eye to eye on Russia's war in Europe, but they do agree on "the principles of independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty."
"Will the EU be pressing Vietnam to press Russia to end the fighting in Ukraine? I'm sure the request will be made, but Vietnam looks likely to sign a contract with Russia to build a new nuclear power station," Hayton told DW.
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Vietnam first formulated its "bamboo diplomacy" in 2016. In the decade since then, the country has managed to avoid being sucked into the power struggle between the US and China in Asia, or the more remote rivalry between the EU and Russia in Europe, while aggressively growing its economy and expanding its diplomatic outreach. The latest EU partnership is a major step for both sides, but seems unlikely to pull Vietnam off its non-alignment course.
Curated by Fatima Al-Hassan
