HANOI, Vietnam — When President Trump looks at Vietnam, he sees what North Korea could become — a thriving economy with luxury high-rises and beachfront condos that has rebuilt itself under Communist rule.
From gleaming new residential towers in Ho Chi Minh City in the south to bustling electronics factories north of Hanoi, Vietnam’s economy is growing at 7 percent per year.
Mr. Trump, who arrives here Tuesday for his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, has called Vietnam’s economic boom “a great miracle.” It’s a stark contrast with impoverished North Korea, which has isolated itself for decades from virtually all other nations except China. The per capita income in North Korea is $1,300 per year, compared with $2,400 in Vietnam and about $26,000 in South Korea.
Mr. Trump has been both lowering expectations and hinting of bigger ambitions for the summit in recent days.
“I’m not in a rush,” Mr. Trump told an assembly of state governors over the weekend. “I don’t want to rush anybody, I just don’t want testing. As long as there’s no testing, we’re happy.” But the president also suggested the second summit with Mr. Kim could be a “tremendous” success.
While Mr. Trump was airborne, Mr. Kim’s armored train was on the move in China, bound toward Vietnam’s capital, The Associated Press reported. Reporters from 40 nations were expected to cover the meeting.
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Pyongyang’s economy has been hit even harder by international sanctions as part of Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, aimed at forcing Mr. Kim to dismantle his nuclear weapons and missile programs.
If Mr. Kim is indeed serious about modernizing his country’s economy, using the model of Vietnam “is certainly an obvious choice,” said Michael Mazza, a security specialist on the Korean Peninsula at the American Enterprise Institute.
“It’s a Communist country like North Korea, one of the few remaining in the world,” Mr. Mazza said. “It’s had a really good, long run of success in developing its economy and doing so while maintaining the Communist Party’s strong grip on power, which is an attractive feature to Kim.”
Although Mr. Kim is telling the U.S. that he wants to build a modern economy, Mr. Mazza said it could also be a familiar ruse.
“It’s not yet clear that this is more than just a front he’s putting on,” he said. “He could very well be playing everybody here.”
Human rights problems
Critics argue that North Korea’s economic aspirations are meaningless without reforming its abysmal human rights record. And they accuse Mr. Trump, who made North Korea’s human rights abuses a centerpiece of his State of the Union address in 2018, of downplaying the problem in his eagerness to get a nuclear deal.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Trump will confront Mr. Kim over human rights during the Hanoi summit, although Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said the administration speaks out against violations “wherever we find them.”
Some analysts say the discussion of North Korea’s economic potential cannot ignore Pyongyang’s record of repression, prison camps and state-sanctioned assassination of dissidents and opponents. They argue that international firms won’t invest in a country without assurances that its employees will be free of intimidation, harassment or worse.
“If you don’t have human rights improvement in North Korea, you can’t get investors,” said Jung Pak, a former CIA analyst and a South Korea specialist at the Brookings Institution. “You’re not going to be drawing lots of people. The human rights issue has to be part of the conversation.”
Victor Cha, a former White House national security aide in the George W. Bush administration, said it is “in the president’s interest to raise this issue to achieve what he wants to achieve. They’re not going to raise this in Hanoi unless the president raises it.”
In January 2018, Mr. Trump invited Otto Warmbier’s parents to his State of the Union address. Warmbier was the Ohio native and University of Virginia student who died after being sentenced to hard labor for a minor infraction while visiting North Korea. Mr. Trump called Fred and Cindy Warmbier “powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world.”
Mr. Cha also said the comparison to Vietnam is more popular with U.S. officials than with the North Koreans.
“I think the North Koreans, in general, feel insulted by the comparison of Vietnam to them,” said Mr. Cha, a Korea specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They see themselves as an advanced, industrialized country, and they see Vietnam as a small, poor Southeast Asian country.”
Vietnam also is dealing with its own economic growing pains. Hanoi, with a population of nearly 8 million, has 5 million motorbikes clogging its streets, prompting the city council to move to ban the bikes by 2030 to reduce soaring air pollution.
The choice of Vietnam as a summit site underscores the vast gap between the two Communist economies. Mr. Kim traveled to Hanoi by train, a marathon 60-hour journey from Pyongyang through China, perhaps in part due to safety concerns with his 45-year-old, Soviet-era jet. Analysts say Mr. Kim may also want to see the development and industrialization of Chinese and Vietnamese smaller cities along the route.
Big investments
In Vietnam, Mr. Kim is expected to visit a Samsung Electronics factory north of Hanoi that employs 70,000 people and is the largest handset manufacturing plant in the world. South-Korea based Samsung has invested $17 billion in Vietnam since 2009, and accounted for nearly one-fourth of all Vietnam’s exports in 2018, according to The Korea Times.
Vietnam also last month joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive free-trade deal from which Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. in 2017.
In a move that should bolster tourism in Vietnam, the Federal Aviation Administration gave its approval last week to Vietnam’s air-safety system, which will allow the country’s airlines to fly to the U.S. Vietnam’s national carrier plans an initial route from Ho Chi Minh City to San Francisco.
Mr. Trump says he would “love” to lift sanctions on North Korea to help the country become an “economic power” bordering China, Russia and South Korea. He’s still hoping the sanctions will induce Mr. Kim to give up his weapons programs.
“We have to do something that’s meaningful on the other side,” the president said last week. “They have great, great potential as a country, and I think that’s what they’re looking to do.”
At their first summit, Mr. Trump commented to Mr. Kim about a portion of his country’s scenic coastline that was the site of military exercises.
Recounting the pitch later for reporters, Mr. Trump said he told Mr. Kim, “Boy, look at that view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo? Instead of doing [missile launches] you could have the best hotels in the world right there. Think of it from a real estate perspective, you have South Korea, you have China, and they own the land in the middle, how bad is that, right?”
Vietnam, still a one-party Communist state, has its own troubled record with human rights. While Hanoi has shown some improvement, the government still has a policy of repressing political dissent, cracking down on faith leaders and stifling freedom of expression.
Joseph DeTrani, a former U.S. envoy to six-party talks with North Korea, said he believes the Vietnam model still makes sense for Pyongyang to emulate, however imperfect the parallels.
“The message to the leadership in Pyongyang is look at Vietnam,” he said. “They’ve had economic development, in the sense that they got rid of Marxism, it’s more of a capitalist system, but they retained the element of Leninism where the party still controls everything. What Vietnam is doing on human rights is not the best-case scenario. But it would be the model.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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