Vietnam's Angle: The South China Sea Dispute and Its Connection to Taiwan's Security
Vietnam fought China in 1979. The two-month border war, triggered by Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to remove the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge government, cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides and ended without a clear military result. Vietnam held its positions. China withdrew. The war left a deep imprint on Vietnamese strategic culture: the understanding that China is a permanent neighbor with permanent interests in Vietnamese subordination, and that resistance — rather than accommodation — is the posture that Vietnamese sovereignty requires.
This historical experience makes Vietnam the ASEAN member state most willing to take hard positions on Chinese maritime claims in the South China Sea, where Vietnam has its own overlapping claims to the Paracel and Spratly Islands that China occupies or contests. Vietnam lost the Paracels to China in 1974 — a battle fought while American forces were withdrawing from Vietnam — and lost Johnson South Reef in the Spratlys to China in 1988 in a naval engagement that killed 64 Vietnamese sailors. These are not abstract historical grievances. They are living strategic realities for a country that shares a 1,300-kilometer land border with China and a maritime boundary dispute that covers some of the South China Sea’s most resource-rich waters.
The connection between Vietnam’s South China Sea position and the Taiwan Strait is strategic rather than operational: Vietnam cannot contribute to Taiwan’s defense and is not part of any alliance structure that would involve it in a Taiwan contingency. What it contributes is a demonstration that sustained resistance to Chinese maritime coercion is possible, that the South China Sea dispute is not resolved simply because China has built artificial islands and declared expansive maritime claims, and that countries adjacent to China are not uniformly acquiescent to Chinese regional dominance.
Vietnam’s defense relationship with the United States has been developing carefully since normalization in 1995. American warships have made port visits to Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay. Defense cooperation agreements have been expanded. Vietnam has been a recipient of American coast guard vessels transferred to expand its maritime patrol capacity. The relationship is deliberately calibrated to develop practical security cooperation without the formal alliance commitments that would trigger the Chinese response that Vietnam’s geographic exposure makes especially dangerous. Vietnam practices what its diplomats call “bamboo diplomacy” — flexible, balanced, unwilling to bend so far in any direction that it cannot straighten.
The rare earth dimension connects Vietnam to the Taiwan semiconductor story. Vietnam has some of the world’s largest deposits of rare earth elements — the critical minerals used in the magnets, electronics, and defense systems that advanced semiconductor supply chains depend on. American and allied governments have been working to develop Vietnamese rare earth mining and processing capacity as part of the effort to reduce dependence on Chinese rare earth supply. If successful, this development would reduce one dimension of the leverage that a Taiwan crisis would give China over the global technology economy. The effort is real but is at an early stage relative to Chinese rare earth dominance.
The South China Sea dispute and the Taiwan question share a common thread: both involve Chinese claims that extend into waters and territories that other parties dispute and that China has been enforcing through a combination of military, paramilitary, and legal pressure rather than through the adjudication mechanisms that international law provides. Vietnam’s experience in the South China Sea — the persistent pressure, the occasional kinetic incident, the dependence on international solidarity that is not always forthcoming — is a preview of the operating environment that Taiwan faces at higher stakes and with less geographic buffer.
Vietnam has not been absorbed. It has not capitulated. It has not been left alone. Its persistence is its own argument about what determined resistance to persistent pressure can achieve.