Obama announces full lifting of Vietnam arms embargo

US President Barack Obama said on Monday (May 23) that the United States is lifting an arms embargo on Vietnam.

“The United States is fully lifting the ban on the sale of military equipment to Vietnam that has been in place for some fifty years,” he said at a joint press conference alongside his Vietnamese counterpart President Tran Dai Quang.

Mr Obama said that the removal of the ban would be part of a deeper defence cooperation with Vietnam.

Advocates argue that an embargo lift is vital to help Vietnam improve coastal defences and bolster its outdated, largely Russian-origin military equipment to better counter Beijing.

But lifting of the arms embargo on Vietnam, one of the last major vestiges of the Vietnam War era, would anger Beijing, which resents US efforts to forge stronger military bonds with its neighbours amid rising tensions in the disputed South China Sea.

“It is welcome that Vietnam improves its ties with any other country, including the United States. However, such rapprochement should not be used by the United States as a tool to threaten or even damage the strategic interests of a third country,” the official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary late on Sunday.

(THE STRAITS TIMES)