China mostly managed to put on a good face after news broke that the Obama administration planned to scrap a decades-old arms embargo to Vietnam – a move that will expand the communist country’s growing weapons stockpiles while complicating both parties’ relationships with Beijing.
A Chinese government spokeswoman said on Monday that the embargo, which was established back in 1984 and was partially lifted in 2014, was “a product of the Cold War and should have never existed.” She said Beijing welcomed the onset of “normal relations” between Vietnam and international trade partners like the U.S.
But trade relations between the U.S. and Vietnam have been anything but normal since the Vietnam War. President Richard Nixon launched an embargo back in 1964, and it wasn’t until the Clinton administration renewed ties with the Asian country in the mid-1990s that import and export restrictions lifted for most industries. A separate weapons embargo enacted in the 1980s, however, remained intact and has since cut Vietnam off from American arms sales.
