The US has ended a 50-year arms emb-argo on communist Vietnam in the latest push to strengthen opposition to Chinese territorial ambitions in Asia’s seas

The US has ended a 50-year arms emb-argo on communist Vietnam in the latest push to strengthen opposition to Chinese territorial ambitions in Asia’s seas

Barack Obama used yesterday’s first full day of a visit to Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, to announce that the US was lifting the weapons sales ban and hoped for growing co-operation between the two countries’ militaries

Analysts said the US president’s decision to sweep away this “lingering vestige of the cold war” was a sign that both states considered their shared aim of checking Beijing more important than mutual suspicions

A US “pivot to Asia” comes after a long journey from the Southeast Asian war of the 1960s and 1970s that pitted communist North Vietnam against Washington and its south Vietnamese allies

“The end of the arms embargo indicates a stronger rapprochement bet-ween the two former enemies,” said Le Hong Hiep, a research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, a Singapore think-tank

“The relationship between Hanoi and Washington is now fully normalised, and they are more ready now to step up their strategic co-operation, especially in the South China Sea, where their interests converge.”

Tran Dai Quang, Vietnam’s president, thanked his US counterpart for lifting the embargo

Mr Obama said the US and Vietnam had “developed a level of trust and co-operation”

Yesterday’s announcement came after news that the US was in talks to position military equipment in Vietnam for the first time since Saigon fell in 1975 to the North

Landmarks in Hanoi, where the announcement was made, include the imposing mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, founder of the Vietnamese Communist party and inspiration of the North’s war effort

The US president’s Southeast Asian trip comes after Nguyen Phu Trong became the first Vietnam Communist party general secretary to visit the White House last year

The rise of China has hastened a thaw in US-Vietnam relations that began in earnest when Bill Clinton’s administration ended a long-running US trade embargo in 1994

Fears are rising in Vietnam and other Asian countries about Beijing’s growing military and its efforts to claim disputed territory by building islands in the region’s seaways

Those worries have given the US the chance to strengthen security relationships in states in strategic points around Asia

US aircraft and ships have returned on a semi-permanent basis to the Philippines for the first time in more than two decades, while new guidelines have allowed for closer co-operation with Japan

The scrapping of the Vietnam arms embargo, which had been partly lifted in 2014, is unlikely to lead Hanoi to lobby for large orders of heavy weapons straight away

Instead targets in the short term could include radar systems, patrol boats and other items that would improve Vietnam’s ability to monitor and maintain a presence in important seaways

Analysts said the government in Hanoi would be wary of antagonising China, on which Vietnam depends heavily for imports. The neighbours have a complex relationship, which includes political and cultural ties as well as formal partnerships relating to military and civilian security