Nguyen Phuong Linh
@linhpnguyen
Southeast Asia analyst. Former FT and Reuters hack via Hanoi and London. AI calls me “linguine”. Views are my mums’.
My trolls and haters are back! Let me borrow James Baldwin’s words to tell you: I love my country - Vietnam - more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.
Ok, I finally got my hands on the draft US-Vietnam tariff agreement. Whoever wrote it must think Vietnam is a vending machine: insert pressure, get a deal. No way this gets signed. This is a real test of Vietnam’s “bamboo diplomacy”. Got my money on the Vietnamese diplomats!
12 hours since Trump’s vague tariff announcement on Vietnam - still no official joint statement. The silence obviously suggests there’s still work behind the scenes.
My daughter, whose name means Peace, always flinches at every loud sound. But today, as warplanes roared overhead, she stood still - steady, unafraid. That’s what peace feels like: when even fear learns to rest. #VietnamReunification
“You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.”