On Saturday, former Chinese Communist Party general secretary Hu Jintao was dramatically removed from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, as the 20th party congress came to a close. Footage of the closing ceremony, recorded for the world’s media to see, showed two men escorting Hu from his seat as General Secretary Xi Jinping, directly next to him, looked on and offered no assistance.

State media outlet Xinhua claimed that Hu was escorted out because he ‘was not feeling well’. That might be true. But the scenes also might have depicted something more sinister. Hu appeared confused as he was pulled away and tried to sit back down. Other top party leaders appeared surprised too. Previous National People’s Congress chairman Li Zhanshu (a Xi ally who on Saturday, as expected, was left off the CCP Central Committee, a group of 205 top party officials, and is no longer on the Politburo Standing Committee) appeared to try to assist Hu.

But, Wang Huning, a top adviser and ally of Xi, then seemed to tug Li back. Maybe he was encouraging Li not to become involved; maybe he knew something that Li did not. We don’t know. So, analysts should consider all possibilities, including that Xi deliberately orchestrated the incident to publicly humiliate his visibly ageing predecessor.

The CCP, after all, is a brutal organisation. Surviving its politics and accumulating power within it require a person to be particularly cunning; otherwise, their chances of survival are low. And, importantly, a rise to power is never a guarantee of power.

Hu is a member of the network of political alliances known as the Tuanpai (团派), or the (Communist) ‘Youth League Faction’. It consists of members of the party who rose to power with Hu Yaobang as their backer. Xi is China’s first leader from the Red Guard generation. The Youth League faction is a group Xi has continually marginalised as he has sought to solidify his grip on power.

Wei Jingsheng is a US-based human rights activist and former political prisoner in China (from 1979 to 1997, under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin; he was only briefly released for a few months in 1993). Wei was imprisoned for calling for democratic reform, after realising that the party inflicted famine on its own people, though prior to that he was himself a Red Guard. He personally knows more about power in the CCP than most Western commentators. He reacted on Twitter:

Little Xi really did it, and has unexpectedly put an end to the Youth League Faction by deceit. Hu Jintao lost his temper on the spot, and was kidnapped from the meeting [as a result]. The Youth League Faction are flowers that grew in greenhouses, and there is no way they could win in a struggle against those who were trained in an actual fight that is the Cultural Revolution, where [they learned] that soldiers should never be tired of deceit and cunning in war. Initially, Hu thought a compromise would help the Youth League suppress the Deng/Jiang factions so they leisurely cosied up to the Xi camp. As a result, they were played by Xi, and still seem rather undignified. What? What? They’ve never seen how the world really works, or how a pig is supposed to run [from the Chinese slang term meaning that even if you’re too poor to have pork, you’ve at least seen a pig running somewhere]?

Wei is referring to the fact that Premier Li Keqiang and Vice-Premier Wang Yang were surprisingly left off the CCP Central Committee. It’s a pretty big deal. Li was expected to step down as premier but could have stayed on the standing committee, and Wang was tipped by many to be promoted to premier. Both Li and Wang are also members of the Youth League Faction.

Wei suggests that Xi deceived Hu, and in the moments before didn’t follow through with a political deal Hu thought had been struck, so Hu reacted angrily and was escorted out.

What’s next for Hu is unknown. If he really was just ill, then perhaps we’ll see him in the future, sitting in the front row as expected. But if Hu’s removal plays out to be a theatrical display of Xi’s political power, then perhaps we’ll learn at some point that Hu has been purged. Or maybe it will stop at what we saw on Saturday night, and we’ll never know for sure. In any case, it’s important to remember that political opponents of the CCP often ‘fall ill’ or die in very questionable circumstances. The political environment does nothing to stop the rumour mill.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Hu has been blamed within the party for enabling a weak environment that allowed corruption to thrive. Xi claims to be dealing with that through his anti-corruption campaign, though corruption accusations are about politics and personal power over and above stamping out graft. Xi’s campaign has come very close to Hu. His former close aide Ling Jihua was sentenced to life in prison in 2016 for corruption.

Xi’s report at the beginning of the party congress was highly critical of Hu’s leadership, though with the corruption campaign that has been a persistent theme under Xi. Still, the language in the work report seems particularly condemning and direct, and blames a situation that was inherited, specifically in the section outlining the situation when Xi took office a decade ago. Here, the report says: ‘Some party members and officials were wavering in their political conviction. Despite repeated warnings, pointless formalities, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance persisted in some localities and departments. Privilege-seeking mindsets and practices posed a serious problem, and some deeply shocking cases of corruption had been uncovered.’ Xi’s 2017 report at the 19th party congress used some similar language, but those comments were contextualised more around what he had done to confront the issues in the previous five years.

Through his leadership and political decisions, including the corruption campaign, Xi has generated a lot of discontent among elite families of the CCP. It’s an area in which even recently it has appeared that he hasn’t fully neutralised opposition. In September, just before the congress, there were rumours of a coup attempt against Xi. He appeared publicly soon after, but the idea that his grip on power might have been more precarious than had been assumed was still worth taking seriously.

Under these circumstances, Xi could have used Hu to send a chilling statement to any opponents. We know that Xi has effectively silenced a lot of opposition, but his actions show that he still perceives threat. If Hu’s removal was political and not health related, it may lend more credence to this idea. Such a public display could be interpreted as a forceful assertion of blunt power against those in the party who oppose Xi. After all, the greatest crises acutely threatening the CCP’s power have come from inside the party itself. And, as Xi must know personally, the threat isn’t usually imagined.

In fact, this wasn’t the first time we’d heard about an alleged attempt to disrupt Xi’s power. Zhou Yongkang was responsible for the massive expansion of the electronic surveillance that has continued under Xi. Even though those Hu-era efforts persist, Zhou and his allies were among the ‘tigers’ taken down in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign. A 2016 book accused Zhou and other tigers of being orchestrators of ‘political plot activities’ aimed at ‘wrecking and splitting the party’. A similar December 2016 Seeking Truth article accused them of having ‘inflated political ambition’, which led to political conspiracy and ‘undermined the party’s organisation’ and unity. Something happened, even though we may never know exactly what.

Even amid the tight security of the party congress, there have been reports that people in China have been receiving iPhone AirDrop messages denouncing Xi. It’s hard to say what the source of those might be, but whether or not something like this is organised from outside or inside China, opposition is real. A few small protests were also reported, successful incidents for their organisers in a time of massively increased public security measures designed to prevent such demonstrations from taking place at all.

The scariest thing is that if Xi perceives an acute threat to his power, it might be from this that he draws the most strength. And this might be the underlying explanation for Hu’s ejection, even if the logic doesn’t quite compute for analysts of China who realise just how unusual the publicness of the incident feels in recent party history.

Xi’s new Politburo Standing Committee is more packed with loyalists than before. They collectively don’t have the bureaucratic experience of previous members. But, for Xi, loyalty is more important than any relevant experience. With added confidence coupled with any perception of threat, Xi might just be bold enough to take other shocking actions in the political domain. On these grounds it’s fair to say Xi’s corruption campaign will probably continue strongly, and possibly become even more brazen in his third term, with or without Hu being purged.

This confidence and perception of threat, which was also clear in Xi’s party congress report, doesn’t bode well for the world’s security. A person drunk on power often makes catastrophic decisions. When that person is in charge of a country that isn’t afraid to be openly adversarial with the rest of the world, these events may portend a dangerous moment. Xi is a person who clearly will do whatever it takes to expand his power, and he has shown no caution in exhibiting this character both inside and outside of China’s borders.

Last Sunday, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, addressed the party’s 20th national congress in Beijing. In dense jargon, Xi spoke for two hours on the party’s achievements and its challenges in building the ‘new China’. He said, ‘We have fully and faithfully applied the new development philosophy on all fronts, focused on promoting high-quality development, and worked to create a new pattern of development.’

He described a China in crisis at the start of his term as chairman in 2012, with ‘misguided patterns of thinking such as money worship, hedonism, egocentricity and historical nihilism’ and in which ‘systems for safeguarding national security were inadequate’. And he talked about how the party has addressed these issues: ‘We have adopted the Five-Sphere Integrated Plan and the Four-Pronged Comprehensive Strategy as well as the general principle of pursuing progress while ensuring stability, and we have worked to both pursue development and safeguard security.’

Xi’s speech at the congress functioned as the most fundamental assertion of power in China’s party-state system. Its stupefying and arcane phraseology, or tifa (提法), all referencing earlier phraseology going back through the history of the party, constructs a closed, deterministic cosmology, informed by a version of Marxist theory, in which history moves ineluctably forward through the resolution of contradictions guided in theory and in practice by the party. Xi’s speech was a representation of the party-state’s system for the realisation of socialism and China’s ‘great rejuvenation’, and, in the party’s terms, advancing human civilisation to eclipse the liberal capitalist democratic world era represented by the United States.

On Taiwan, Xi accordingly built on established formulations that appeared in his 2019 speech, in the new Taiwan white paper, and earlier. He said, ‘Resolving the Taiwan question and realising China’s complete reunification is, for the party, a historic mission and an unshakable commitment.’ He said unification is a historical inevitability: ‘The wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’ He claimed the party is committed to peaceful unification under the ‘one country, two systems’ model, which provides an intermediate stage before Taiwan is fully absorbed into the party’s vision of China, but the party needs to struggle, potentially with military force, against the separatists and foreign forces that hold back those wheels of history.

The ideological construction of Taiwan by the party justifies and requires escalating threats against Taiwan, but for a military invasion and occupation the party will need to claim that Taiwan’s de facto sovereignty is an existential threat to its revolutionary project. This is flagged by Xi’s use of the phrase ‘all necessary measures’ to achieve unification.

The truth is that Taiwan really is an existential threat to the party’s project. Taiwan has been on its own path of post-imperial development for more than a century, since the end of the Qing dynasty, through Japanese colonial rule, authoritarianism and to democracy. Taiwan’s sovereignty and modernisation have come to represent the party’s failure, both in theory and in practice. Taiwan has been very successful, too—this year its per capita GDP passed Japan’s for the first time and is far higher than that of any province in China.

Like other ideological constructs, such as GDP growth targets, the CCP’s version of Taiwan is not a policy response to Taiwan’s objective reality. As Xi showed in his speech, Beijing brooks no history other than the party’s history, and it has no practical roadmap to achieve unification that addresses objective questions like the future of the Taiwanese military or the security of Taiwan’s place at the centre of global technology supply chains. Instead, Xi offers a set of declarations about Taiwan’s place in the party’s future.

Xi’s speech has been subject to forensic analysis, down to counting phrases and terms. A particular focus is looking for a sign in Xi’s word usage or tone of a timeline or deadline for annexing Taiwan. But the practice of parsing the language of Xi’s speeches for such signs can concede to the party the power to control the geopolitical discourse about Taiwan. Rather than directly confronting the reality of annexation under whatever circumstances or timeline—that is, China launching a war against Taiwan and a military occupation that will permanently destabilise the international system—the practice of divining Xi’s intent places analysis within the party’s closed worldview.

Unlike some economic and financial analysis, foreign policy analysis struggles with the issue of how to develop a systematic critique of the Chinese party-state system, its policy choices and its ideology. Foreign policy analysis is by inclination wary of critiques of power, and when it does adopt a stance of critique towards power in the international system, it generally arrives at a view of China as a challenge to the dominance of the US. This can be a fruitful, sometimes righteous line of inquiry, but it attenuates the specifics of China’s system, occludes the people of Taiwan and can locate a critique of Beijing’s Taiwan policy within pro-US politics.

Yet, a critique of Beijing’s Taiwan policy and ideology has become a necessary step. Reducing the future of Taiwan to great-power competition makes it harder to see that Beijing’s Taiwan policy is an ideologically fixated assertion of party power that is disconnected from reality and points China towards potential catastrophe. China is certainly not the first great power to set itself on such a path and there are no easy options for the international community in response, but a clear focus on Beijing’s agency must be the starting point.

As Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand gear up to host major world summits next month, the 55-year-old Association of Southeast Asian Nations is facing an existential crisis, owing to severe internal splits over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Myanmar’s military coup and other issues. The 2007 ASEAN charter’s vision of deeper political, economic, security and socio-cultural integration is no more. Salvaging what’s left will require accepting that reality and regrouping accordingly.

Notwithstanding past bureaucratic and functional pledges to do more together, ASEAN’s regional integration has always been shallow. Intra-regional trade in goods remains low, at 21.3%, and trade in services trade is under 12%, according to data from the ASEAN secretariat. Moreover, 88% of investment in the region comes from outside sources. Unlike the European Union, with its economic integration through a single market, ASEAN has emphasised cross-border connectivity through hard and soft infrastructure, from roads and railways to tourism and people-to-people contacts.

True, for a while after the ASEAN charter took effect, the organisation appeared to be going places. At the time, the region’s economy was the fastest-growing in the world, and its promising trajectory coincided with Myanmar’s post-2011 decade of political opening and economic reform.

Harnessing that internal momentum, ASEAN took the lead in organising regional projects for peace and security, through gatherings of the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit and the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus. Corporations and investment funds formulated ASEAN-focused strategies, recognising the region’s promise as an interconnected production hub with a combined GDP of more than US$3 trillion and more than 680 million people, many of them young and comprising an expanding middle class.

But this narrative of ASEAN progress has lost its lustre as the geopolitical setting has changed. ASEAN’s success requires relative peace and a rough balance between the major powers in its orbit. When the big powers are locked in a zero-sum conflict—as between Russia and the West or China and the United States—ASEAN almost inevitably will become as divided and ineffective as it was before Cambodia joined as the tenth and last member state in 1999.

Consider China’s interests in the South China Sea, Myanmar’s internal conflict and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Each issue pulls different ASEAN member states in different directions. Cambodia supports China and Myanmar’s junta under the State Administration Council, but not Russia. Laos appears to be backing all three. And Vietnam has been critical of China, but silent on Myanmar’s military dictatorship and sympathetic to Russia.

Meanwhile, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore have aligned in expressing concerns about China’s belligerent role in the South China Sea, the Tatmadaw’s takeover in Myanmar and Russia’s war. And while Thailand has been soft on China’s territorial assertiveness and Myanmar’s putsch, it has taken a measured stand against Russia’s aggression.

Myanmar itself is a telling case. The United Nations still recognises the ambassador from the civilian-led government, and ASEAN so far has refused to allow the State Administration Council to represent the country in its major gatherings. As a result, Myanmar was on the record voting to condemn Russia at the UN even as the council openly supported the Kremlin. Having failed to promote dialogue and negotiation in Myanmar with its ‘five-point consensus’ last year, ASEAN’s rotating chairmanship, led by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, is now pressing harder against the junta and its leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

Still, the situation in Myanmar is threatening to derail November’s ASEAN-anchored summit meetings in Phnom Penh. And Russia’s war has cast a shadow over the APEC meeting in Thailand and this year’s G20 summit in Indonesia the same month.

To navigate this fraught geopolitical environment, ASEAN needs a new approach. Members that are willing and able to take common positions should do so without waiting for unanimity among all 10 countries. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore are already leading the way, and others, such as Thailand and Vietnam, can join them on specific issues that serve their interests. The new model could perhaps follow an ‘ASEAN 5+X’ formula, with the five original members—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore—serving as a renewed organisational core.

The old ASEAN is gone for good. The region will not be completely united through political-security, economic and socio-cultural communities. But nor will the organisation be disbanded. Instead, its likeminded members should pursue a hard realignment, so that individual parties—like Myanmar’s military—can’t paralyse the rest of the group. For now, the new ASEAN should centre on the founding five members plus Vietnam. If Cambodia and Laos want to be regarded as core members, they will need to moderate their positions, rather than carry water for external powers.

The idea of forming an ASEAN economic community is no longer an option. Instead, governments, civil-society organisations and businesses with stakes in Southeast Asia will need to start thinking of the region’s integration as an à la carte menu rather than a five-course meal.

At the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, starting on Sunday , Xi Jinping will almost certainly be confirmed for a third term as the party’s general secretary and China’s president. With that, he will become China’s longest-serving paramount leader since Mao Zedong, and the rules and norms that are supposed to govern the CCP regime will be shattered.

Those rules and norms were put in place largely by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, who took power in 1978. Deng knew firsthand the damage the party’s ideological fanaticism could do. During the Cultural Revolution, one of his sons was paralysed by rampaging Red Guards. Deng himself was stripped of his official positions and sent to work at a factory in a remote province for four years—one of three times he was purged from government during his long revolutionary career.

To ensure that China would never again be gripped by such terror, Deng—with the support of other veteran revolutionaries who had survived the Cultural Revolution—restored collective leadership and imposed age and term limits for most senior CCP positions. In the decades that followed, China’s top leaders served no more than two terms, and Politburo members respected an implicit age limit of 68.

But Xi has exposed just how fragile Deng’s ‘rules-based system’ really was. In fact, for all the hoopla about Deng’s accomplishments, his record on reining in the CCP regime is mixed, at best, not least because his own commitment to the rules was not nearly as robust as one might expect.

In practice, Deng disdained collective leadership and formal procedures. He seldom held Politburo Standing Committee meetings, because he wanted to deny his main rival, a staunch conservative opposed to economic reform, a platform to challenge his policy. Instead, he exercised leadership through private meetings with supporters.

In dealing with leaders sympathetic to pro-democracy forces, Deng frequently violated the procedures and norms he had established. His dismissal of two liberal CCP chiefs—Hu Yaobang in 1986 and Zhao Ziyang (who refused Deng’s order to implement martial law during the Tiananmen crisis) in 1989—defied the party’s bylaws.

At the same time, Deng sometimes avoided introducing a rule at all, if doing so could undermine his political interests. Most notably, he—together with other ageing CCP leaders—did not impose age or term limits on Politburo members. Even if they could not hold formal government posts indefinitely, they would never lose their decision-making authority.

Likewise, Deng enacted no formal rules governing who could chair the Central Military Commission. This enabled him to continue to do so after he had resigned from his other posts. Following that precedent, Jiang Zemin did the same in 2002. As for Xi, while he had to go through the motions of getting the presidential term limit removed from the constitution in 2018, he benefited from the fact that the CCP has not imposed an official term limit on its general secretary.

There is nothing shocking about China’s struggles to uphold rules and norms. Even mature democracies like the United States face such challenges, as Donald Trump’s presidency clearly showed. But should formal constitutional checks and balances fail, democracies can at least count on a free press, civil society and opposition parties to push back, as they did against Trump.

In dictatorships, rules and norms are far more fragile, as there are no credible constitutional or political enforcement mechanisms, and autocrats can easily politicise institutions, such as constitutional courts, turning such bodies into rubber stamps. And there are no secondary enforcement mechanisms. China has no free press or organised opposition. If a rule becomes inconvenient—as the constitutional limit on presidential terms did for Xi—it can easily be changed.

While trampling institutional rules and norms may benefit autocratic rulers, it is not necessarily good for their regimes. The CCP’s experience under Mao is a case in point. Unencumbered by any institutional constraints, Mao engaged in ceaseless purges and led the party from one disaster to another, leaving behind a regime that was ideologically exhausted and economically bankrupt.

Deng understood that a rules-based system was essential to avoid repeating that disastrous experience. But his conviction could not overcome his self-interest, and the institutional edifice he built in the 1980s turned out to be little more than a house of cards. Xi’s confirmation this month is merely the breeze triggering its inevitable collapse.

Geography influences the strategic choices of all countries, but Vietnam is an interesting case of a ‘swing’ state in comparative grand-strategy terms. The country occupies the eastern part of the Indochinese Peninsula, with an elongated coastline of 3,260 kilometres facing the South China Sea. Vietnam also sits unambiguously in continental Asia, sharing a 1,300-kilometre border with China, as well as abutting Cambodia and Laos. This duality in Vietnam’s situation, straddling Southeast Asia’s geostrategic fault line, gives it unusual flexibility to develop a continental or maritime orientation. Despite a strong landwards pull in Vietnam’s history, Hanoi has latterly and perhaps decisively adopted a maritime course, though the country’s grand strategy remains dynamic and is actively debated among observers.

In the second half of the 20th century, Vietnam’s communist leadership was absorbed by the anti-colonial struggle and national unification. The long wars against France and then the United States, when Hanoi’s ideological and material allies were the Soviet Union and China (to a lesser extent), encouraged a continental disposition. Coastal supply routes were important to sustaining Hanoi’s revolutionary war effort in South Vietnam, but the main axis of supply ran overland through Laos and Cambodia, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnam’s armed forces lacked the means to contest US sea control in the South China Sea. China forcibly expelled South Vietnamese forces from the Paracel Islands in 1974, though Hanoi maintains Saigon’s claim. After reunification in 1975, Vietnam’s border conflict with China in 1979 and prolonged military intervention in Cambodia throughout the 1980s ensured that Hanoi was preoccupied by land-based threats for the remainder of the Cold War, with the exception of a brief clash with China in the Spratly Islands in 1988.

In the 21st century, however, Vietnam has transformed into an export-oriented economy that depends upon freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and beyond, to deliver its prosperity. This has influenced its threat perceptions. The majority of Vietnam’s population and infrastructure is concentrated on the coast, making it vulnerable to attack from the sea. Vietnam has to defend and police the oil, gas and fish within its exclusive economic zone, as well as its territorial claims in the Spratly Islands. If, in future, China is able to exert uncontested control within the so-called nine-dash line, and acquires access to a naval base in Cambodia, Vietnam could find itself encircled and vulnerable to blockade. Once access to seaborne trade is denied, Vietnam would suffer immediately and grievously.

The move towards a maritime strategy is evidenced by changes to Vietnam’s defence capability. Despite the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis, Vietnam doubled its defence expenditure between 2006 and 2010. From 2009, it began acquiring six Russian Kilo-class submarines armed with anti-ship and land-attack Klub supersonic cruise missiles capable of hitting China. The modernisation of the Vietnam People’s Navy was officially declared a priority at the 11th National Party Congress, in 2011. The 2019 defence white paper put a seal on Vietnam’s strategic reorientation by officially identifying it as a maritime nation. Vietnam is unlikely to prevail in a serious maritime conflict with China, but it has made significant investments to raise the costs of aggression.

Despite these trends, it has been argued recently that Vietnam should ‘look west for its survival’ and refocus its strategic attention from the maritime domain to its land borders because ‘the balance of power on land works more in Vietnam’s favour’. According to this line of argument, Hanoi has little long-term hope of defending its maritime claims in the South China Sea due to the growing power disparity between China and Vietnam.

But the strategic situation on land is less severe than it may first appear. In reality, a binary continental-versus-maritime dilemma is somewhat artificial; Vietnam will continue to look landwards for its security, and to some extent for its prosperity too. Hanoi cannot overlook the possibility of invasion or incursion across its land borders. It is also the case that Vietnam’s armed forces remain army dominated for historical reasons. However, China and Vietnam signed a border treaty in December 1999, which was ratified in 2000. The two sides completed border demarcation in 2009. Although China has a dominant economic profile and significant political influence in both Cambodia and Laos, Vietnam’s Southeast Asian neighbours remain sovereign states and are unlikely to allow the People’s Liberation Army to launch attacks on Vietnam from their territory. Even if Phnom Penh and Vientiane agreed to host PLA ground and air forces, invading Vietnam would be prohibitively expensive, as demonstrated by Russia’s war in Ukraine and, indeed, China’s costly invasion of northern Vietnam 43 years ago.

By contrast, China’s unilateral and expansionist actions in the South China Sea haven’t faced serious consequences. Since 2009, Beijing has incrementally ramped up its claims across the South China Sea, consolidated its control in contested areas, interfered with the sovereign economic activities of other claimants within their exclusive economic zones, and militarised those features it has converted from rocks and reefs into artificial islands. China can exert pressure on Vietnam from the sea at much less risk to itself than over land, including but not limited to the use of grey-zone tactics.

If Vietnam were to vacate the features that it occupies in the Spratly Islands, China would be certain to fill the resulting vacuum, further strengthening its control. Giving up on the South China Sea would be widely unpopular with the Vietnamese public, potentially threatening the legitimacy of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Most importantly, accommodating Beijing’s maritime expansionism as a fait accompli would undermine Vietnam’s long-term security and that of the surrounding region. Hanoi has progressively aligned its domestic legislation with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and international law because its long-term interests are best served by upholding the rule of law and peaceful dispute resolution.

Vietnam’s maritime strategic orientation has fostered closer economic and security partnerships with Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. As Vietnam attracts more foreign investment, including production relocated from China, it has become important to international supply chains, giving other countries an increased stake in its security. External assistance has significantly improved Vietnam’s maritime law enforcement capacity, enabling it to develop its marine economy despite continuous pressure from China in the South China Sea.

Any reversal of the prevailing maritime strategy is therefore unlikely to hold water with Hanoi’s key decision-makers, who have embraced a maritime orientation as essential to Vietnam’s national security.