I would love to have Vietnam as an ally.
Their government might be communist, but the people are friendly and steeped in free enterprise.
We need all the allies in Asia we can get to stand against the Chinese—and the Vietnamese, like the Koreans and Japanese, among others, of course have historical reason to fear them.
I returned to DaNang, taking my wife, too, in 2004 to do some missionary work. At the end of our stay, we all flew to Saigon. Yes, the locals STILL call it Saigon, rather than the official “Ho Chi Minh City”.
In our few days there, I was struck by the impression that there are more capitalists/free enterprise people in Saigon than in Charlotte or Atlanta, let alone NYC, DC, LA, San Fran or even Seattle!
You don’t have a communist government and free enterprise. That’s like having hot and cold at the same time. Asia is reverting to its historical past. You have authoritarian rulers running a market society. It used to be aristocracy type rule, now it’s party rule. It could well morph back to aristocracy as it is apparently doing in North Korea.