Vietnam, US deepen defense ties with focus on war legacy remediation

In a New York conference room on the morning of September 21, Vietnam's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister General Phan Van Giang sat across from John Noh, the US Assistant Secretary of War for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs. The meeting was brief and formal, but it carried the weight of decades of unfinished business—the search for soldiers who vanished during the war that ended fifty years ago.

Giang was in the United States as part of a larger delegation accompanying Vietnam's Communist Party General Secretary and President To Lam, who had come to address the United Nations General Assembly. But this defence ministry conversation was its own kind of diplomacy, one focused not on grand strategy but on the concrete work of finding the dead and caring for the living.

Noh opened by affirming what has become a cornerstone of US-Vietnam relations: the importance of the partnership itself. The United States, he said, values Vietnam's role in the region and wants to deepen cooperation on matters of peace, stability, and development. But he quickly moved to the specific work that has defined recent defence ties. He thanked Vietnam—particularly its Defence Ministry—for the active support it has provided in searching for American servicemen missing in action. The US Department of War, he said, considers this work a top priority in the bilateral relationship and remains committed to continuing it.

Giang responded by praising the American department's coordination in organizing an event dedicated to the search for missing persons from the war. He framed this as evidence of US commitment to Vietnam's own 500-day campaign to accelerate the search for, collection, and identification of the remains of Vietnamese and American soldiers who disappeared during the conflict. The campaign is not abstract—it is a specific, time-bound effort to resolve cases that have haunted families on both sides for generations.

The two officials then outlined the architecture of their cooperation. Both sides agreed to continue work across several areas: war legacy remediation itself; the search and identification of remains; bilateral defence policy dialogue; defence industry collaboration; maritime security; and military medicine. Giang also pressed the United States to support Vietnam in addressing the broader consequences of the war—not just finding the missing, but implementing community support programmes and tackling environmental contamination in areas where fighting was heaviest. These are the lingering costs that persist in the soil and in the lives of people who still live there.

The conversation ended with an invitation. Giang asked senior leaders and officials from the US Departments of War and Navy, as well as American defence companies, to attend the third Vietnam International Defence Expo, scheduled for December 2026 in Hanoi. It was a gesture toward the future—a signal that the two countries see their defence relationship not as a reckoning with the past alone, but as an ongoing partnership with commercial and strategic dimensions.

On the same day, Giang also met with leaders of technology firms, and To Lam convened a separate gathering with Vietnamese experts and intellectuals living in the United States. The visits were layered—defence talks, business outreach, and intellectual exchange happening in parallel, each reinforcing the others. What emerged was a picture of two countries that fought a devastating war and are now, decades later, working methodically to address what it left behind.