May 11, 2022 CSIS

John J. Hamre: My name is John Hamre and I want to welcome all of you. This is a largest group we’ve had at CSIS in two years. And it’s great to have you here. I want to say a special thank you to the Prime Minister. We are honored to have him here. We have been privileged to have hosted several very important previous leaders in Vietnam. Back in 2015, we had the secretary general of the Communist Party. That was Nguyen Phu Trong. That was in 2015. In 2013, we had President Truong who was here with us. And so today it’s a real privilege to have Prime Minister Pham.

You know, it was just very interesting because today I had a meeting with my Board of Trustees and we spent much of the morning talking about the remarkable changes that are going on in the world today, especially in Asia. You know, the aftershocks of COVID, the kind of difficulties with supply chains, companies wanting to see more reliability in supply chains, and in almost every part of the conversation one country came up. And it was Vietnam. Everybody said, Vietnam is an important new partner here. But there was also an additional sentence, which is: Vietnam is being held back because it doesn’t have the infrastructure that it needs to become this leading partner in global supply chains. And so I think there’s an agenda that America and Vietnam could be working on.