One has to go digging into the jobbers' trade press for the stunning statistics about the extent of Vietnam's trade growth with the U.S. About $1.8 billion in apparel exports will be sold by the Vietnamese to the U.S. in 2004, and that's a bit of a decline over last year. But it's not just MADE IN VIETNAM tags on the baby clothes at Target anymore. There's another $2 billion in trade with fish, electronics, cashews, shrimp, furniture, pepper, shoes and other goods from Vietnam coming into the U.S., showing a 28% rise over the previous year.   Ten years ago, the figure was zero. Today, America is Vietnam's largest trade partner, buying up about 20% of Vietnam's exports. And Vietnam is America's 35th largest trade partner out of 264 nations, a respectable rank.
 
It's been a quiet productive ten years since the U.S. lifted the trade embargo on Vietnam in 1994 and started largely trouble—free trade with the country that was once our bitterest enemy. One wonders if that's why President Bush chose to stand next to the Vietnamese president in the official photograph of Asian Pacific leaders, and was prominently seen with him on a couple of other occasions at last week's APEC conference in Chile. 

Vietnam is growing in importance as a U.S. trade partner, and this represents a significant change. Since the early 1990s, Vietnam went through a long series of diplomatic hoops to lift the U.S. postwar trade embargo and establish trade agreements with the U.S., and it was not an easy process. But with $4 billion now in their pockets and President Bush standing next to Vietnam's president at the world's premier economic success club, the message from Vietnam is: Peace pays.

A.M. Mora y Leon   11 28 04