When U.S. President Barack Obama met with Vietnamese civil society members during his recently concluded official visit to the Communist Party-led country, half of the chairs at the appointed venue were empty. Hours before the scheduled meeting staged to symbolically show U.S. solidarity with the country's grass-roots democrats, security officials pre-emptively detained three of the invited participants, including a blogger, a journalist and an aspiring opposition politician.
The previous day, Obama announced that Washington would lift its decades-old lethal arms embargo on Vietnam, a concession the country's authoritarian leadership has long sought. The embargo has loomed ever larger as China consolidates its strategic position over Vietnam in contested areas of the South China Sea.
While Obama claimed the former battlefield adversaries had buried "ideological differences" by ending the ban on lethal weaponry sales, the reality is that his administration chose to reward one of Asia's least democratic regimes, with one of the region's worst rights records, without notable progress on freedoms and liberties.