HANOI, Vietnam — The Obama administration is ready to move to the “next level” of close relations with Vietnam despite concerns and “profound differences” over human rights, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said during a visit Thursday to Hanoi.
The administration sees Vietnam “as not only important on its own merits, but as part of a strategy aimed at enhancing American engagement in the Asia Pacific, and in particular Southeast Asia,” Clinton said after a meeting with Foreign Minister Pham Gia Khiem.
On the last stop of a week-long trip that also took her to Pakistan, Afghanistan and South Korea, Clinton is in Vietnam to attend a regional security conference and to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the re-establishment of diplomatic relations under then-President Bill Clinton.
“For me personally and for my husband … this anniversary is especially poignant,” she said at a lunch given by the local American Chamber of Commerce. The two visited Vietnam in late 2000 on the last foreign trip of his presidency.
At a joint news conference, Clinton said she had raised the subject of human rights with the Vietnamese, including the jailing of dissidents and Internet restrictions. Khiem responded that President Barack Obama had said that “human-rights values should not be imposed from the outside,” an apparent reference to a speech last year on China, when Obama said the United States would always stand for human and political freedoms, but that “these are not things that we seek to impose.”
Those allusions were the only critical note in exchanges that overwhelmingly emphasized the positive, including a growing U.S.-Vietnamese trade relationship and expanding U.S. investment.
