What Tô Lâm Revealed in Singapore and Hà Nội About Việt Nam’s Foreign Policy Ambitions

Tô Lâm has had a busy two weeks on the diplomatic front, with state visits to several ASEAN countries and high-profile speeches at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore and the ASEAN Future Forum in Hanoi. 

Through the two speeches, Tô Lâm maintained some of Việt Nam’s core foreign policy narratives about survival within great power competition, but he has also introduced new narratives on Việt Nam’s economy, technology, and defense policies. 

For some, his speeches are markers of Tô Lâm’s ambition to elevate Việt Nam on the international stage. For others, the speeches raise worrying signs about the leader’s views on the state’s role in monitoring free speech through technology.

This article seeks to unpack Tô Lâm’s two important speeches and their implications for the direction of Việt Nam’s foreign and domestic policies. It argues that Việt Nam’s foreign affairs are evolving: it will likely increase its usage of foreign relations to actively justify the security apparatus’ domestic control.

Việt Nam’s New Image?

Tô Lâm’s speech at Shangri-La is a call to a global respect for the rule of law and the promotion of diplomatic dialogue between countries. While identifying different global crises and proposed solutions, he did not condemn China and the United States by name but hinted at them through phrases such as “coercion,” “unreliable commitment,” and “big fish swallowing small fish.”

To an international audience, Tô Lâm’s values-based speech marked a stark contrast to U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s speech, especially as Hegseth called for an increase in military spending right after boasting about the U.S. capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro—an action that likely spooked Southeast Asian countries.

In Hanoi, less than two weeks later, Tô Lâm reiterated many of his points during the ASEAN Future Forum (AFF), where he proposed pragmatic changes to ASEAN to cope with big power competition.

On a strategic level, Tô Lâm is positioning Việt Nam as an upholder of international law, a proponent of global peace through diplomatic channels, and potentially a leader of ASEAN – as Nguyễn Khắc Giang  argued in Fulcrum. 

This image is not exactly new, but Tô Lâm’s efforts have intensified it. He wants Việt Nam to not just passively participate in the global order but to actively shape it—creating a different image from before, even when the core messages are similar.

A counterargument is that the grand words are just sugarcoating for Việt Nam’s old ways. As Carl Robinson pointed out, a domestic audience can interpret Tô Lâm’s rhetoric very differently. His usage of terms and phrases such as “human security” or “protecting the information space”is also used domestically by Việt Nam’s security apparatus to justify arrests and censorship.

What Tô Lâm Was Really Saying

Another way of looking at this situation is combining both of those views. 

It is not a secret that Tô Lâm has various foreign policy ambitions—his bid to become Việt Nam’s president was precisely because he wanted to play a stronger and more visible role in external affairs. This ambition is evident in the elevation of Foreign Minister Lê Hoài Trung—his former chief of staff—to the Politburo and in the designation of foreign affairs as a “core, frequent” mission. 

Therefore, it is not unimaginable that Tô Lâm would want Việt Nam to become a regional leader through rebranding its own image as an open, peace-loving, international law-abiding country. In fact, as president, he is now the face of this image.

However, this rebranding would most likely be undermined by Việt Nam’s continued atrocious human rights record, which has been condemned by various countries, including the United States, the European Union, and Australia. It is widely known that the Ministry of Public Security—Tô Lâm’s power base—directs and executes these atrocities. 

To preemptively respond to global concerns, Tô Lâm appears to have turned to foreign affairs as a defense of the security apparatus—combining an old playbook of invoking sovereignty and asking other countries to “trust” Việt Nam with a strategy of its own. 

In his Shangri-La speech, Tô Lâm emphasized that AI, digital transformation, and cyber space would only exacerbate “large-scale skepticism,” “information manipulation,” and the “erosion of societal trust.” He argued that the most important security question is how to “control technology.” Meanwhile, in his AFF speech, Tô Lâm identified “fake news” and “information manipulation” as among the most notable challenges to global order and economic development.

These are not the words of his predecessor Nguyễn Phú Trọng nor of his mentor Nguyễn Tấn Dũng, who also addressed the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2013. These are the words of a man who spent his entire career in public security. Of course Tô Lâm would be concerned about uncontrollable flows of information.

The writing is on the wall: because technology is so untrustworthy and unsafe, Việt Nam’s security apparatus and its censorship of the “wrong” information is more important than ever. If you disagree, it means you are a “big fish” bully violating Việt Nam’s “trust.”

Việt Nam is entering a new era – not of liberal progress, but of a leader who knows how to harness universal concerns to skillfully mask the country’s continued authoritarian tendencies. This is not entirely new: Việt Nam has long deployed its diplomatic apparatus for precisely this purpose. Under Tô Lâm, it is clear that these efforts will only intensify.