Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, has spent his first year on an unusually busy diplomatic circuit, but one visit has left analysts scratching their heads.
In October, just two months after visiting Seoul, where Vietnam signed US$250 million in South Korean arms deals and deepened ties with its largest foreign investor, To Lam flew to Pyongyang to stand beside Kim Jong-un at a military parade, making him the first general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam since Nong Duc Manh in 2007 to set foot in North Korea.
The optics hardly make sense: Vietnam courts South Korea for capital, technology and supply-chain security, while the North offers none of these.

The answer lies less in the logic of foreign policy than in Vietnamese politics. Foreign policy, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, is the extension of domestic politics by other means. For To Lam, it has become a stage on which to perform ideological loyalty to socialist orthodoxy while pushing a far more hard-nosed economic agenda at home.

In that regard, the Pyongyang trip was no anomaly. In just over a year, To Lam has visited all of Hanoi’s historical ideological allies, collecting a list of firsts no Vietnamese paramount leader before him had attempted.

Vietnam’s To Lam talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (right) before a meeting in Pyongyang, North Korea, last month. Photo: VNA/AP

Vietnam’s To Lam talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (right) before a meeting in Pyongyang, North Korea, last month. Photo: VNA/AP

He became the first party chief ever to lay flowers at the grave of Karl Marx in London (his second pilgrimage to Marx’s tomb, curiously, after doing the same four years earlier as minister of public security). He was also the first party leader after the Cold War to appear on the viewing stand of a Victory Day parade in Moscow and oversaw the inaugural participation and oversaw the inaugural participation of the Vietnam People’s Army in this year’s Russian procession.