A number of the US newspapers have recently published articles highlighting the warming relationship between the US and Vietnam on the threshold of the US President’s visit to Vietnam.
In an article entitled “ Obama Aims to Deepen Ties on Asia Trip”, The Wall Street Journal noted that President Barack Obama will spend three days in Vietnam , an unusually long presidential visit for a single country.
That is intended to show the US ’s interest in expanding ties with the Southeast Asian countries, it said.
According to the article, while in Vietnam, the US President will encounter a country that has largely left the war’s trauma behind and is looking ahead to deepening its relationship with America.
Hanoi has become a tourism hub, while Ho Chi Minh City is a hotbed of tech startups.
The article also quoted Jack London, a professor at City University of Hong Kong (China), as saying that the president’s visit is the latest step in a decades-long courtship between the former adversaries.
The Los Angeles Times has run an article entitled “ Obama heads to Vietnam and Japan to confront the ghosts of old wars amid turmoil in modern ones”.
The paper said for nearly eight years, President Obama has struggled to end wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He will finally succeed in closing chapters on two other ones instead – Vietnam and World War II, it said.
According to the article, the President’s visit to Vietnam and Japan sends a message indicating that it needs efforts and time to reach the real peace.
Meanwhile, the CNN has published an article saying that in his first presidential visit to Vietnam , President Obama will encounter a country undergoing rapid change and seeking ever-closer ties to the US.
Vietnam has a broader role to play in the Pentagon's recent embrace of networked security in Asia, a vision that supplements America 's four bilateral alliances, namely Japan , Australia , Singapore and the Philippines , with a web of connections among partners and allies, it said.
In the contexts of constrained defense budgets, rising Chinese assertiveness, and questions about the future trajectory of US foreign policy, locking in the transformation of Vietnam from enemy to partner would say a great deal about American priorities.
President Obama's visit represents the chance to begin writing that new chapter, according to the paper.
President Barack Obama will pay an official visit to Vietnam from May 23 to 25 at the invitation of the Vietnamese leadership.
VNA
