The President's Visit to Vietnam

Over the past 20 years, much has changed in Vietnam. Some Vietnamese are a little richer, but universally recognized human rights remain elusive for most. The Vietnamese Communist Party has opened up a bit to the outside world but remains closed to the idea of democracy and the rule of law. U.S.-Vietnamese relations have warmed because of Vietnam's fears of China's increasing economic power and its incursions into the South China Sea. But human rights improvements have not come from so-called better relations. The Obama administration has included Vietnam, a dictatorship, among several democracies in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, granted potentially lucrative trade benefits to Communist leaders. President Obama has also lifted the U.S. arms embargo against Vietnam. In other words, the U.S. is poised to provide lethal weapons to a brutal dictatorship that jails and tortures dissidents. Where are the background checks of those soldiers and secret police who will have access to sophisticated weapons? Who will monitor the use or abuse of these lethal weapons? What is triggered if U.S.-supplied weapons are used to commit atrocities? The Administration chose to reward one of Asia's most repressive regimes with the region's most worst human rights record without getting any tangible progress on freedoms and liberties.