Vietnam and the United States: Domestic Constraints and Strategic Opportunities

While the intensifying US-China strategic rivalry in the Asia-Pacific might seem to confirm the realist paradigm of international politics, the intriguing dynamics of Vietnam-US relations underscored the inadequacy of the neo-realist emphasis on structural constraints as the explanation of interstate behavior. This thesis seeks to fill in the analytical gap by identifying the strategic factors as well as domestic considerations that have informed Vietnamese and US policy toward each other since the process of normalization of bilateral relations began in the early 1990s and examining the interaction between them. In doing so, the thesis takes the two-level game theory as the primary conceptual framework for unpacking the domestic-foreign policy linkages in the Vietnam-US relationship. A two-level game explanation would suggest that the level of congruity between Vietnam's objectives as regards the bilateral relationship and those of the US determines the tempo of cooperation between the two countries. How those objectives are formulated is a function of Vietnamese and American policymakers' interpretations of the international and domestic pressures thrust upon them. The analysis that this thesis aims to provide would contribute to both the scholarship on Vietnam-US relations and the research program on the connection between domestic and international politics