Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense completed an internal military document in August 2024 titled “The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan,” which labels the United States a “belligerent” power and outlines preparations for a possible American “war of aggression” against the country. The document, made public through a report by The 88 Project — a Vietnam-focused human rights organization — and first reported by Associated Press journalists David Rising and Aniruddha Ghosal from Hanoi on approximately February 3, 2026, reveals that Hanoi views Washington not as the strategic partner suggested by recent diplomatic upgrades, but as an existential threat to Communist Party rule. This is a jarring revelation given that President Biden signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with Vietnam just one year earlier in 2023, elevating relations to their highest diplomatic level — on par with Vietnam’s ties with Russia and China. For investors tracking defense stocks, Southeast Asian supply chains, and the broader geopolitical risk landscape, this disclosure matters.
It introduces a layer of uncertainty into one of the most important economic relationships in the Indo-Pacific region. Vietnam has become a critical node in global manufacturing as companies diversify away from China, and any deterioration in U.S.-Vietnam relations could send ripples through sectors ranging from semiconductors to textiles. This article examines what the document actually says, why Vietnam’s military views the U.S. differently than its diplomats, how China factors into the threat calculus, what the Trump administration variable means, and what investors should be watching as this story develops. The document does acknowledge that “currently there is little risk of a war against Vietnam,” which is an important caveat. But its existence and its tone tell a story about deep institutional distrust that no trade agreement or diplomatic handshake has been able to erase.
Table of Contents
- What Does Vietnam’s Internal Military Document Say About Preparing for an American War?
- Why Vietnam’s Military Fears “Color Revolution” More Than Conventional Invasion
- How China Fits Into Vietnam’s Threat Assessment — And Why That Surprises Analysts
- What the Trump Administration Factor Means for U.S.-Vietnam Relations and Investor Risk
- Internal Divisions Within Vietnam’s Government — The Real Risk Factor
- The Historical Memory That Shapes Vietnam’s Military Thinking
- What Investors Should Watch Going Forward
- Conclusion
What Does Vietnam’s Internal Military Document Say About Preparing for an American War?
The document, authored by Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense and completed in August 2024, does not predict imminent conflict. Its language is more diagnostic than alarmist, but it is unambiguous in its framing. It states that “due to the U.S.’s belligerent nature we need to be vigilant to prevent the U.S. and its allies from ‘creating a pretext’ to launch an invasion of our country.” Vietnamese military planners argue the U.S. wants to “spread and impose its values regarding freedom, democracy, human rights, ethnicity and religion” to gradually change Vietnam’s socialist government. This is not the language of a country that considers the U.S. a partner. It is the language of a country that considers the U.S.
a long-term adversary whose tools of regime change are subtler than tanks and bombers. The document also traces what it views as an escalating American strategy across three administrations — Obama, Trump’s first term, and Biden — to pursue military relationships with Asian nations to “form a front against China.” This framing is significant because it suggests the Vietnamese military interprets American engagement in the region not as a shared interest in countering Chinese expansionism, but as the construction of an alliance system that could eventually be turned against any government washington finds inconvenient. Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project and the author of the report that made the document public, put it plainly: “The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan provides one of the most clear-eyed insights yet into Vietnam’s foreign policy. It shows that far from viewing the U.S. as a strategic partner, Hanoi sees Washington as an existential threat and has no intention of joining its anti-China alliance.” What makes this document particularly notable is the timing. It was completed roughly one year after the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership was signed — an agreement that was widely celebrated in Washington as a major diplomatic win. That a military planning document of this nature was being drafted simultaneously suggests a significant gap between what Vietnam’s diplomats were saying publicly and what its generals were planning privately.
Why Vietnam’s Military Fears “Color Revolution” More Than Conventional Invasion
The document’s primary concern is not a conventional military assault. American aircraft carriers steaming into the South China Sea to invade Vietnam is not the scenario keeping Hanoi’s generals up at night. What they fear is an externally fomented “color revolution” — an uprising against Communist Party rule analogous to the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine or the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines. In this reading, the United States does not need to fire a single shot. It just needs to fund civil society groups, promote democratic values, and wait for internal dissent to reach a tipping point. This fear is not entirely abstract.
In June 2024, tensions surfaced publicly when U.S.-linked Fulbright University in Vietnam was accused by an army TV report of fomenting a “color revolution.” Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry defended the university, but the episode revealed the fault lines within the Vietnamese government itself — between those who see American engagement as an economic opportunity and those who see it as a Trojan horse. Nguyen Khac Giang of the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore noted that “the military has never been too comfortable moving ahead with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the United States,” highlighting tensions between the Communist Party’s conservative, military-aligned faction and those pursuing closer U.S. ties. However, investors should be careful not to overinterpret this as an imminent policy shift. If Vietnam’s reformist faction maintains influence over economic policy, trade and investment flows may continue largely uninterrupted even as the military establishment maintains its adversarial posture toward Washington. The risk is not that Vietnam suddenly closes its doors to American business. The risk is that a domestic political crisis, a provocation, or an external shock could tip the internal balance of power toward the hardliners — and the military already has its playbook written.
How China Fits Into Vietnam’s Threat Assessment — And Why That Surprises Analysts
One of the most counterintuitive elements of the document is its treatment of China. Despite ongoing territorial disputes with Beijing in the South China Sea — disputes that have at times involved physical confrontations between Vietnamese and Chinese vessels — the document portrays China more as a regional rival than an existential threat. The distinction is critical. Vietnam’s military planners apparently believe they can manage competition with China because Beijing does not seek to overthrow the Communist Party of Vietnam. The United States, in their view, does. Zachary Abuza of the National War College in Washington explained the logic: “China doesn’t pose an existential threat to the Communist Party (of Vietnam).” This is a calculation rooted in regime survival, not national security in the traditional sense. Vietnam and China share a communist ideological heritage, and whatever their disagreements over maritime borders, Beijing has no interest in promoting democracy in Hanoi.
Washington, by contrast, routinely links its foreign engagement to human rights, press freedom, and democratic governance — all of which the Vietnamese Communist Party views as direct threats to its monopoly on power. For investors, this reframing of the threat hierarchy has concrete implications. It suggests that the popular narrative of Vietnam as a natural U.S. ally against Chinese expansion is more complicated than it appears. Companies that have been building supply chains in Vietnam partly on the assumption that Hanoi would align with Washington in a U.S.-China confrontation may need to revisit that assumption. Vietnam’s hedging strategy is not new, but this document reveals just how deeply institutionalized the distrust of the U.S. really is within the military establishment.
What the Trump Administration Factor Means for U.S.-Vietnam Relations and Investor Risk
The Trump administration introduces a particularly confusing variable into Vietnam’s strategic calculations. On one hand, Trump has historically downplayed human rights and democracy promotion — the very things that the Vietnamese military document identifies as America’s primary tools of regime change. On the other hand, the Trump administration’s military operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro gave Vietnamese conservatives fresh justification for their fears about American willingness to violate sovereignty and remove foreign leaders. Abuza captured the paradox: “The Vietnamese are going to be confused by the Trump administration, which has downplayed human rights and democracy promotion, but at the same time been willing to violate the sovereignty of states and remove leaders they don’t like.” This is not a theoretical concern. Vietnam maintains close ties with Cuba, and any U.S. military action involving Cuba could further upset the strategic balance. Vietnamese hardliners would view such action as confirmation that American power is unpredictable and that no country with a government Washington dislikes is truly safe.
The tradeoff for investors is real. Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy could, in theory, deepen economic ties with Vietnam by deprioritizing human rights conditions that typically accompany U.S. engagement. But the same unpredictability that makes Trump less ideologically threatening also makes him more strategically threatening. A tariff escalation, an offhand remark about regime change, or a military action in Latin America could all shift the internal Vietnamese debate in ways that affect trade, investment, and supply chain stability. The U.S. State Department, for its part, declined to comment directly on the document but stressed that the partnership agreement “promotes prosperity and security for the United States and Vietnam.”.
Internal Divisions Within Vietnam’s Government — The Real Risk Factor
The most important takeaway from this document may not be its content but what it reveals about the internal politics of Vietnam’s ruling establishment. The document was produced by the Ministry of Defense, not the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Swanton noted “a consensus here across the government and across different ministries” on the views expressed in the document, but the Fulbright University incident in June 2024 — where the Foreign Ministry publicly defended an institution the military was attacking — suggests that consensus may be thinner than it appears. This internal division is where the real investor risk lies. Vietnam’s economic miracle of the past two decades has been driven by a faction within the Communist Party that favors integration with Western markets, foreign direct investment, and export-led growth.
The military establishment, as this document makes clear, operates from a fundamentally different set of assumptions about the world. Nguyen Khac Giang’s observation about the military’s discomfort with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership points to an ongoing tug-of-war that could shape policy in unpredictable ways. The warning for investors: do not assume that economic engagement with Vietnam is on autopilot. Political risk in Vietnam is not primarily about what happens between Washington and Hanoi. It is about what happens between Hanoi and Hanoi — between the reformists who want deeper ties with the West and the military conservatives who view those ties as an existential threat. Any shift in this internal balance, whether triggered by a domestic scandal, a leadership transition, or an external shock, could change the investment landscape rapidly.
The Historical Memory That Shapes Vietnam’s Military Thinking
The Vietnamese military’s distrust of the United States is not a product of contemporary geopolitics alone. Abuza noted that the Vietnamese military still has “a very long memory” of the war with the U.S. that ended in 1975 — a conflict that killed an estimated two to three million Vietnamese and left the country physically and economically devastated. The document’s title itself, “The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan,” is a deliberate invocation of that history.
For a generation of senior Vietnamese military officers who were trained in the shadow of that war, the idea that America could one day return as an aggressor is not paranoia. It is institutional memory codified into doctrine. This historical dimension matters because it means that the attitudes expressed in the document are unlikely to change quickly, regardless of how many trade deals are signed or diplomatic partnerships are upgraded. Institutional cultures, particularly military ones, evolve slowly. Investors with long time horizons in Vietnam should factor this into their risk models: the country’s military establishment is a structural force that will continue to push back against deeper American alignment, even as other parts of the government welcome it.
What Investors Should Watch Going Forward
The next several months will be telling. Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the document, which is itself a signal — silence in diplomatic contexts is rarely accidental. How Hanoi manages the fallout from this disclosure will reveal whether the reformist or conservative faction currently has the upper hand. Key indicators to watch include any changes in military-to-military cooperation between the U.S. and Vietnam, shifts in rhetoric from Vietnamese state media, and the trajectory of trade negotiations under the Trump administration.
The broader lesson for portfolio managers and analysts is that geopolitical risk in Southeast Asia is becoming more layered. The simple narrative of “Vietnam as China alternative” needs refinement. Vietnam is not choosing sides. It is managing multiple threats simultaneously while trying to preserve the Communist Party’s grip on power. That is a fundamentally different strategic posture than the one most Western investors have priced in, and this document is the clearest evidence yet of that gap between perception and reality.
Conclusion
The disclosure of Vietnam’s “2nd U.S. Invasion Plan” is a sobering reminder that diplomatic optics and strategic reality can diverge sharply. While the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership signed in 2023 suggested a deepening U.S.-Vietnam alignment, this Ministry of Defense document — completed just a year later — reveals that Vietnam’s military establishment views the United States as an existential threat to Communist Party rule, fears American-backed “color revolution” more than conventional invasion, and considers China a more manageable competitor despite active territorial disputes. The internal divisions between Vietnam’s military conservatives and economic reformists represent the most consequential risk factor for investors operating in or exposed to the Vietnamese market.
For those with capital deployed in Vietnam or in companies heavily reliant on Vietnamese supply chains, this is not a signal to panic but it is a signal to pay closer attention. Monitor the internal political dynamics, watch for any cooling in U.S.-Vietnam military cooperation, and stress-test assumptions about Vietnam’s role as a reliable alternative to China-based manufacturing. The document itself acknowledges that war is unlikely. But the institutional mindset it reveals — one rooted in historical memory, regime survival instincts, and deep suspicion of American intentions — is a durable feature of Vietnamese strategic thinking that no single trade agreement will overcome.