The Domestic Calculations of To Lam’s Foreign Policy

Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, has spent his first year on an unusually busy diplomatic circuit. Among his 20 foreign stops (by author’s count), one has left analysts scratching their heads. In October, just two months after visiting Seoul, where Vietnam inked US$250 million in South Korean arms deals and deepened ties with its largest foreign investor, To Lam flew to Pyongyang to stand beside Kim Jong Un at a military parade, making him the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) since Nong Duc Manh in 2007 to set foot in North Korea. The optics hardly make sense: Vietnam courts South Korea for capital, technology, and supply-chain security while North Korea offers none of these.

The answer lies less in the logic of foreign policy than in Vietnamese politics. Foreign policy, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, is the extension of domestic politics by other means. For To Lam, it has become a stage on which to perform ideological loyalty to socialist orthodoxy while pushing a far more hard-nosed economic agenda at home.

In that regard, the Pyongyang trip was no anomaly. In just over a year, To Lam has visited all of Hanoi’s historic ideological allies, collecting a list of firsts no Vietnamese paramount leader before him had attempted. He became the first CPV party chief ever to lay flowers at the grave of Karl Marx in London (his second pilgrimage to Marx’s tomb, curiously, after doing the same four years earlier as minister of public security). He was the first CPV chief after the Cold War to stand on the viewing stand of Moscow’s 2025 Victory Day parade and oversaw the inaugural participation of the Vietnam People’s Army in the procession.

These gestures are not aimed at foreign publics but are crafted for intra-party consumption. The CPV is entering a sensitive pre-congress period. Despite his rapid consolidation of power, To Lam must still soothe a system that prides itself on collective leadership and ideological discipline. He has ruled by decree more than deliberation. His domestic reforms, while widely welcomed by the public and overseas observers, are unsettling the conservatives — including the propaganda apparatus and the military — who fear Vietnam is drifting from its socialist foundations. To Lam’s domestic position is strong, but not impregnable. His whirlwind of socialist symbolism targets precisely these groups. The message is simple: Vietnam may be deepening integration with the West, but it is not drifting ideologically.

For all his authority, To Lam’s success depends on binding together ideological conservatives, military elites and retired luminaries while pushing through disruptive reforms.

Cuba offers the clearest demonstration of this signalling. During his visit to Havana in September 2024, To Lam proclaimed that “solidarity with Cuba is what President Ho Chi Minh always desired” and promised the relationship would last “forever” (author’s translation). Cuba contributes virtually nothing to Vietnam’s economy as the island is impoverished and isolated, but the visit was never about economics. This reassured Party cadres that To Lam remembers where Vietnam came from even as he charts where it must go.

If the itineraries signal reassurance, the entourages suggest coalition building. On several recent trips, To Lam has taken the unusual step of inviting retired Politburo members who still wield considerable influence. His travel companions have included former minister of public security Le Hong Anh, former National Assembly chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, former Hanoi party chief Pham Quang Nghi and former Standing Secretariat member Tran Quoc Vuong. None has an official diplomatic role, yet they retain patron-client networks and factional influence that matter when the Congress determines leadership positions.

In Vietnam’s often opaque politics, unexplained inclusions can themselves be explanations. With the 14th Party Congress approaching in 2026, To Lam appears to be quietly knitting together a coalition of veteran heavyweights who can bless personnel arrangements, calm competing factions, and lend legitimacy to whatever reshuffle emerges. These senior figures serve not merely as symbolic endorsements but as brokers, reassuring different blocs that they remain represented in the emerging order. Taking retired Politburo members on trips rewards them with visible status while providing cover for sensitive negotiations that would draw scrutiny if conducted at home.

Despite his dramatic ascent, To Lam still operates within a system that tolerates neither soloists nor strongmen. Vietnam’s leadership remains an intricate web of committees, Party commissions, regional barons, military interests and technocrats. His ambitious domestic programme: trimming bureaucracy, pivoting to the private sector, restructuring state-owned enterprises and attracting high-tech investment requires not just authority but buy-in. He must convince conservatives that Vietnam’s ideological identity is intact; reformists that modernisation will accelerate; and the military that it still sits at the strategic heart of the regime, even as Vietnam diversifies away from Russian arms and seeks closer security partnerships elsewhere. Foreign policy thus becomes an arena of domestic negotiation: a way to signal balance, reassure doubters, and accumulate allies.

Viewed from Western capitals, it may seem puzzling that Vietnam’s reform-minded leader spends political capital applauding Soviet-style parades or visiting a 19th-century philosopher’s tomb. These gestures are not directed at London, Brussels or Washington, but are pitched at the upcoming Party congress, where the next leadership line-up will be assembled and where questions about “orientation” and “loyalty” still matter as much as growth targets.

For all his authority, To Lam’s success depends on binding together ideological conservatives, military elites and retired luminaries while pushing through disruptive reforms. His foreign policy — part pragmatic outreach, part socialist pageantry — is the outward expression of that domestic project. The world may be watching To Lam’s diplomacy but To Lam is watching the home front and his back.

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