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Last week Hanoi did something dramatic: it simultaneously broke ground and cut ribbons on 250 mega-projects—highways, ports, metro lines, chip-making parks—worth roughly US $50 billion. That is one-third of Vietnam’s entire pre-COVID annual budget, a sum officials describe as “the down-payment on the next twenty years of modernity.” Most outsiders read the headline and moved on. They shouldn’t. What looked like an infrastructure binge is actually Vietnam’s final attempt to outrun a trap that has already snapped shut on every other export-led miracle in East Asia.
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The trigger was Donald Trump’s “reciprocal-tariff” order in March. Overnight, Vietnam’s average U.S. duty jumped from 8 % to 26 %; garments, furniture and semiconductors face 35 %. The UN Development Programme calculates that, if the rates stick, Vietnam will ship roughly $25 billion less to America each year—one-fifth of its current exports. For an economy that has grown 6-7 % a year by selling sneakers and smartphones to California, that is not a head-wind; it is an iceberg.
The trigger was Donald Trump’s “reciprocal-tariff” order in March. Overnight, Vietnam’s average U.S. duty jumped from 8 % to 26 %; garments, furniture and semiconductors face 35 %. The UN Development Programme calculates that, if the rates stick, Vietnam will ship roughly $25 billion less to America each year—one-fifth of its current exports. For an economy that has grown 6-7 % a year by selling sneakers and smartphones to California, that is not a head-wind; it is an iceberg.
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So Hanoi is doing the only thing left that does not require a foreign passport: pouring concrete at home. Public investment is the last of the “three engines” (exports, consumption, capital formation) still under party control, and officials are flooring the throttle. The theory is textbook Keynes—build today, grow tomorrow—but the context is pure casino. Vietnam is betting that domestic demand, not Wal-Mart shelves, can keep industrialization alive long enough for Chinese, Korean and American firms to decide, once again, that 60-cent Vietnamese labor is still cheaper than moving home.
So Hanoi is doing the only thing left that does not require a foreign passport: pouring concrete at home. Public investment is the last of the “three engines” (exports, consumption, capital formation) still under party control, and officials are flooring the throttle. The theory is textbook Keynes—build today, grow tomorrow—but the context is pure casino. Vietnam is betting that domestic demand, not Wal-Mart shelves, can keep industrialization alive long enough for Chinese, Korean and American firms to decide, once again, that 60-cent Vietnamese labor is still cheaper than moving home.
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The odds are lousy. Vietnam’s track record on big builds is a graveyard of missed deadlines. Ho Chi Minh City’s first metro line took 12 years to go 19 km; Hanoi’s lone light-rail needed a decade to travel 13 km; Long Thanh “mega-airport” has been a PowerPoint slide since 2005 and still has no runway. Corruption, land-clearance spats and a bureaucracy that treats environmental impact statements like sudoku puzzles have pushed every signature project past its original budget by at least 40 %. Repeating that performance with 250 overlapping schemes would blow a hole in public finances big enough to sink the dong.
The odds are lousy. Vietnam’s track record on big builds is a graveyard of missed deadlines. Ho Chi Minh City’s first metro line took 12 years to go 19 km; Hanoi’s lone light-rail needed a decade to travel 13 km; Long Thanh “mega-airport” has been a PowerPoint slide since 2005 and still has no runway. Corruption, land-clearance spats and a bureaucracy that treats environmental impact statements like sudoku puzzles have pushed every signature project past its original budget by at least 40 %. Repeating that performance with 250 overlapping schemes would blow a hole in public finances big enough to sink the dong.
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Yet the bigger problem is strategic, not managerial. The East-Asian playbook—start with garments, save the dollars, climb into steel, petrochemicals and cars, then export capital—assumes someone, somewhere, is still happy to run the largest current-account deficit on earth. The United States no longer wants the job. Europe is busy re-shoring. China, once the spill-over market that bought Korean chips and Japanese parts, is now the competitor. Globalization is not pausing; it is being re-wired to exclude the very late-comers who once surfed its waves.
Yet the bigger problem is strategic, not managerial. The East-Asian playbook—start with garments, save the dollars, climb into steel, petrochemicals and cars, then export capital—assumes someone, somewhere, is still happy to run the largest current-account deficit on earth. The United States no longer wants the job. Europe is busy re-shoring. China, once the spill-over market that bought Korean chips and Japanese parts, is now the competitor. Globalization is not pausing; it is being re-wired to exclude the very late-comers who once surfed its waves.
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Vietnam’s misfortune is to have arrived at the industrial ball just as the music stopped. The country reunited in 1976, immediately picked a fight with Beijing and spent the next decade in collectivist autarky. By the time it pivoted to “market socialism with Doi Moi” in 1986, Thailand had already stolen the garment shift, Korea had stolen the memory-chip shift and China was vacuuming every spare dollar of FDI. Hanoi squeezed into the global supply chain anyway—Nike shoes, Samsung phones, Intel chipsets—but the slot was narrower and the lease shorter than anything enjoyed by Japan, Korea or Taiwan. Trump’s tariffs did not invent Vietnam’s predicament; they simply turned off the last exit ramp.
Vietnam’s misfortune is to have arrived at the industrial ball just as the music stopped. The country reunited in 1976, immediately picked a fight with Beijing and spent the next decade in collectivist autarky. By the time it pivoted to “market socialism with Doi Moi” in 1986, Thailand had already stolen the garment shift, Korea had stolen the memory-chip shift and China was vacuuming every spare dollar of FDI. Hanoi squeezed into the global supply chain anyway—Nike shoes, Samsung phones, Intel chipsets—but the slot was narrower and the lease shorter than anything enjoyed by Japan, Korea or Taiwan. Trump’s tariffs did not invent Vietnam’s predicament; they simply turned off the last exit ramp.
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So the government is doing what trapped gamblers do: double down, borrow more chips and hope the wheel lands on red. If the projects somehow finish on time, they could shave logistics costs by 15-20 %, keep factories from migrating to Indonesia or India and give domestic suppliers a sliver of the market now monopolized by foreign assemblers. If they don’t, Vietnam will be left with a mountain of debt, half-built bridges and a generation that still stitches T-shirts for Target but can no longer sell them there.
So the government is doing what trapped gamblers do: double down, borrow more chips and hope the wheel lands on red. If the projects somehow finish on time, they could shave logistics costs by 15-20 %, keep factories from migrating to Indonesia or India and give domestic suppliers a sliver of the market now monopolized by foreign assemblers. If they don’t, Vietnam will be left with a mountain of debt, half-built bridges and a generation that still stitches T-shirts for Target but can no longer sell them there.
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History will record the irony: a nation that once defeated two superpowers on the battlefield may finally be broken by the collapse of a trading order it had no hand in designing. The infrastructure splurge is not a stimulus package; it is a Hail Mary pass in the last seconds of a game whose rules changed mid-air. Whether the ball is caught or not, Vietnam has already learned the hardest lesson of late industrialization—timing is everything, and the clock rarely forgives.
History will record the irony: a nation that once defeated two superpowers on the battlefield may finally be broken by the collapse of a trading order it had no hand in designing. The infrastructure splurge is not a stimulus package; it is a Hail Mary pass in the last seconds of a game whose rules changed mid-air. Whether the ball is caught or not, Vietnam has already learned the hardest lesson of late industrialization—timing is everything, and the clock rarely forgives.
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