To Lam’s Regional Tour: From Hedger to Shaper

To Lam’s latest tour had the look of a regional roadshow and the rhythm of a campaign. Between 27 May and 1 June, Vietnam’s party chief and president called on Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore, with a keynote at the Shangri-La Dialogue in the island state. The visits yielded more than 70 cooperation and business documents, a great deal of ink for a diplomacy often careful to the point of opacity. They capped off an unusually frenetic half-year that had already taken him to Beijing, Colombo, New Delhi, Phnom Penh, Washington and Vientiane. His regional tour shows that Hanoi is aiming higher in its foreign policy vision, seeking to shape its environment rather than merely mitigate risk.

Yet the numbers are the less interesting part. Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore map Vietnam’s emerging regional priorities. In Manila, the key message was security: the two sides elevated their ties to an Enhanced Strategic Partnership and renewed a defence pact spanning maritime security, military education and disaster response. The soldiers from the two South China Sea claimants are better known for playing sports on disputed features than for quarrelling. They have quietly become useful partners against an assertive China.

In Bangkok, Vietnam and Thailand marked 50 years of bilateral relations.  The theme was connectivity and commerce: a 2026–2031 action programme, the Mekong corridors and a VietJet deal to build an aircraft maintenance hub at U-Tapao International Airport. In Singapore, it was about building the economy of the future: green energy, digital infrastructure and supply-chain resilience that both states now treat as a security matter.

To Lam’s Shangri-La keynote was the intellectual centre of the trip — and, for those who recall Vietnam’s last turn on that stage, a measure of how far Hanoi has travelled. In 2013 the then-Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung built his address around “strategic trust”. He appealed to an order he considered fundamentally sound and asked the great powers to abide by it.

To Lam’s speech was darker yet more ambitious. He diagnosed three converging crises — of the international order, of development models and of trust itself — and argued that economic fragility has become the raw material of strategic vulnerability.

He did not name China and the US, yet the targets were plain: coercion (read: Beijing) and unreliable commitment (read: Washington). By criticising their conduct rather than criticising them directly, To Lam rebuked both without giving either of them a reason to take offence. Where Nguyen Tan Dung petitioned for trust, To Lam proposed ways to engineer it: early-warning mechanisms, incident-management protocols, emergency communications, technology norms and preventive diplomacy. The dispute in the South China Sea, which was a prominent issue in 2013, barely surfaced. In To Lam’s rendering, the “blood” of security coursed through the commercial “veins” of supply chains, undersea cables, energy, food and data. Economic development, in his telling, is security itself.

It is a sharper reading of the region’s troubles, and yet a self-interested one. The same openness that has made Vietnam a winner of globalisation is now exposing it to potential coercion from every side:  through tariffs, export controls, data rules and energy chokepoints. In a sense, the new “weapons” of globalisation are just as lethal as traditional arsenals of power such as maritime militia and coast guards. The tour, as a result, was the response of a country trying to build regional resilience from the inside out.

Does this amount to a bid for ASEAN leadership? Yes, but with a caveat. Vietnam does not seek to become the bloc’s “hub of power”, as To Lam put it in answer to a question from the author on the Shangri-La floor. What it can plausibly seek is subtler: a place in ASEAN’s collective leadership. That ambition meets an institution whose centrality has grown both more necessary and less convincing — necessary because small and middle powers need a platform to engage great powers without getting picked off one by one; less convincing because ASEAN so often struggles to act with speed or unity to deal with its own issues.

His Shangri-La keynote was the intellectual centre of the trip — and, for those who recall Vietnam’s last turn on that stage, a measure of how far Hanoi has travelled.

To earn a bigger role, Hanoi should first show that its policy vision reaches beyond the South China Sea, its clearest interest and easiest case. The credentials of a regional builder are won on harder problems: Myanmar’s civil war, climate resilience, cyber norms, food security and crisis management. There are signs that Hanoi grasps this. Leveraging its special standing with Bangkok and Phnom Penh, Hanoi is understood to have worked discreetly to cool the Thailand–Cambodia border conflict that flared periodically in 2025. Last year, it hosted the signing of the first UN treaty against cybercrime, the region’s most pressing non-traditional security issue.  

Second, leadership needs buy-in from regional partners. This explains Hanoi’s diplomatic spree. In under two years, To Lam has upgraded ties with every major ASEAN state to the highest tier, the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP). Only the Philippines sits a notch below, at the Enhanced Strategic Partnership agreed on during his visit. While giving top billing to almost everyone risks draining the label of meaning, the CSP framework allows Vietnam to work with different partners across different priority areas.  Either way, what counts is less the number of partnerships than the network they form — the constituency a would-be convenor must first cultivate.

Third, ambition abroad must be matched by capacity at home. A stronger and more modernised nation lends weight to Vietnam’s gravitas abroad. Vice versa, a more respected Vietnam abroad lends substance to To Lam’s promise of an “era of national rise”. Keeping the reform engine running, in other words, matters as much for foreign policy as for domestic politics.

To Lam’s tour, then, is a bid to turn Vietnam from a quiet hedger into a selective shaper of rules. But frameworks are easier to table than to enforce, and grand designs usually fail in the follow-through. Whether the deeds match the words is another matter.

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