Exclusive: ASEAN Future Forum 2025 and Vietnam Bamboo Diplomacy

Exclusive interview with lead organizer of upcoming ASEAN forum on where it is headed, tech race, middle power diplomacy, minilateralism and much more.

INTRODUCTION

[Note to the ASEAN Wonk Community: The ASEAN Wonk Team conducted an exclusive interview on February 11 with the president of The Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam previewing its hosting of the upcoming ASEAN Future Forum scheduled for February 25-26. We are running this as a special episode of our ASEAN Wonk Podcast. The wide-ranging discussion covers minilaterals in the shifting regional institutional landscape; middle power diplomacy; Vietnam’s foreign policy prospects in a “new era” as it prepares for its next party congress in 2026; and much more].

ASEAN Wonk: Welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast, where we bring you expert insights and regional perspectives on Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific geopolitics and geoeconomics. I'm your host Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran. If you haven't already, do subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk platform at www.aseanwonk.com so you don’t miss all of our posts.

Our guest today is Dr. Nguyen Hung Son, who is the acting president of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam and served over two decades in Vietnam's foreign ministry in various roles, including at the ASEAN department. We start the conversation talking about Vietnam’s current foreign policy posture and previewing its upcoming hosting of the ASEAN Future Forum later this month, a new forum within the regional landscape. Make sure you tune into the full episode as we go through other subjects, including the regional tech race, middle power diplomacy, minilateralism and where Vietnam’s bamboo diplomacy is headed with its upcoming party congress in 2026.

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VIETNAM FOREIGN POLICY EVOLUTION AND THE ROLE OF MULTILATERALISM AND ASEAN

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast Hung Son and let's get started. I'm wondering if you could help contextualize Vietnam’s ties with ASEAN within its wider foreign policy approach, which is centered around various components including multidirectionality. Vietnam joining ASEAN in 1995 was arguably one of the major post-Cold War shifts in the region, given some of the regional tensions that existed previously. We're now at 30 years since Vietnam joined ASEAN, and Vietnam has made several contributions along the way. You've worked as a diplomat in various roles, including on ASEAN affairs. How have you seen Vietnam's perceptions of ASEAN evolve over time during this period within its foreign policy?

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Well, first of all, thank you for including me in this very interesting podcast. Well, it's a very good question. We’re marking the thirtieth anniversary of Vietnam entering into ASEAN and becoming a formal ASEAN member. And I would say that becoming an ASEAN member is one of the most successful Vietnam's foreign policies. Why so? Because right after the Cold War, we were a member of the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Bloc members, and we were more confrontational to ASEAN. But after the Cold War ended, we sought to become a member of ASEAN, and that has opened up the new whole world for Vietnam. And that was the beginning of Vietnam entering into regional integration, international integration, and that was the foundation of the success that we've enjoyed over the past nearly four decades. So arguably, ASEAN membership provided us a lot. And ASEAN today is one of the most important pillars of Vietnam foreign policy. And Vietnam is seeking to or is trying to become an even more active member of the regional and international community. And ASEAN is absolutely indispensable for that journey of Vietnam, in its international integration.

So that's the importance of ASEAN to Vietnam. And as a diplomat, I started out as an expert in the ASEAN department of the ministry. I observed that journey, and I've seen how more active Vietnam has become in ASEAN business within the region. And today, we have this ASEAN Future Forum, which is a Vietnam's initiative, which represents the contribution that Vietnam is trying to make to ASEAN at a very critical juncture of the organization development. So that's the context of the ASEAN Future Forum that we are going to have in two weeks' time.

BAMBOO DIPLOMACY IN VIETNAM’S FOREIGN POLICY APPROACH

ASEAN Wonk: And can I ask you: one of the labels that we've heard about on Vietnam's foreign policy approach in recent years has been this idea of “bamboo diplomacy” right? Bending, not breaking. The idea of principles symbolized by a sturdy trunk and firm roots, but also flexible adjustments in terms of the branches. How does ASEAN fit in within that perspective of bamboo diplomacy? Because obviously, it's a very stormy geopolitical environment for Vietnam to navigate.

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Okay. That's another very good question. Bamboo diplomacy, it's a great metaphor that depicts Vietnam's foreign policy qualities. And one of those qualities is to stick together with allies and friends in order to be strong, in order to be resilient.

And that's precisely what ASEAN is for Vietnam. It provides the solidarity. It provides the added strength that a country alone would not have. And that's critically important at this time, as you said, a very stormy weather, where more countries are pushed and pulled by the forces of great power competition. You need friends. You need allies. And ASEAN is Vietnam’s home. ASEAN is Vietnam ally in order to stay strong in such a geopolitical weather that Vietnam is experiencing. So if you want to use the metaphor of the bamboo, then the bamboo banded together through ASEAN is what Vietnam is looking for.

SOUTHEAST ASIA’S INSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPE AND THE ASEAN FUTURE FORUM IN PERSPECTIVE

ASEAN Wonk: Great. I wanted to transition to talk about the ASEAN Future Forum. And the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, which you're the acting president of, is very well known for convening a lot of these dialogues. I had the benefit of participating in one of those dialogues in September last year. The ASEAN Future Forum, as you mentioned earlier, is quite a significant development. A lot of the dialogues regionally in Southeast Asia tend to be concentrated primarily in maritime Southeast Asia. So if you look at the broader Indo-Pacific or global interactions like the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, or if you look at the Asia-Pacific Roundtable in Malaysia, this is really a big initiative by Vietnam that helps also distribute the sort of convening role more within Southeast Asia as well. So it's quite a significant development.

Alongside that, we have seen Vietnam also take other convening initiatives. We saw the defense exhibition that just occurred in Vietnam a few months ago. Vietnam has worked with the World Economic Forum on a number of events prior to this. Can you help us conceptualize what was the origin process of the ASEAN Future Forum and how it was socialized and came to be? Because these are not very easy undertakings for any country. And you having been part of this initiative at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, with Vietnam and the government, how do you see that process of the origin and the socialization?

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Well yes. You're right. There are a lot of activities within ASEAN already. ASEAN is known to be an organization with a lot of meetings, and many of the initiatives are taken by the so-called maritime ASEAN members. We have the Shangri-La Dialogue. We have the Asia-Pacific Roundtable by Malaysia and so on. And so we thought, well, many people thought that adding more meetings into the ASEAN business is very tough.

But nevertheless, Vietnam thought that, well, no matter how many or how much discussion there are on ASEAN, it’s not enough. Especially at this critical juncture, you need more talk, and talk is what is lacking in the international community at the moment. People needed to have more talks. And especially in this region, we needed more strategic talks. We needed to think out of the box. We needed to be more innovative, be more creative, to look back, reflect on ASEAN, and see squarely what challenges ASEAN faces and to provide out of the box solutions or recommendations to the organizations. Hence, we proposed the idea of a Track 1.5 dialogue that is dedicated to ASEAN. That is what is lacking in this region. We have several similar Track 1.5 undertakings – the Shangri-La Dialogue, the Asia-Pacific Roundtable, the defense dialogue by Indonesia, the Jeju Forum, and so on. But none of them is dedicated to ASEAN and its relationship with its partners. So we decided to fill the gap by proposing the idea, and, fortunately, in its first and second iteration, which we are holding this year, we've received some good feedback. We've received some support in the region. It's too early to say if this initiative is going to be long-lived, but I believe that there is a gap there that we are trying to fill, and we are doing a good service to ASEAN and to the region by providing this. And so that's the origin of it.

ASEAN Wonk: Great. And I’m wondering if you could say a little bit about that process that you mentioned. Obviously with any initiative within ASEAN, you do need to get support of other countries as well. Vietnam hosted the first iteration of the ASEAN Future Forum last year. And then subsequently, we saw the Forum mentioned in an ASEAN joint statement last year in Vientiane, alongside other priorities about community-building. This is a pretty big year for ASEAN in terms of the issuance of the Vision 2045, a twenty-year vision for the bloc. So, this matters from the regional community-building perspective as well. But I'm wondering if you could help elaborate on that point as to where it stands in terms of socialization and the support among the other member states?

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Yeah. So when Vietnam came up with the initiative, we certainly went around and told our friends about our ideas. And we raised it to the foreign ministers and the leaders to explain to them what this is for. And last year, Laos was the chairman of ASEAN. Certainly, Laos wanted a lot of support in terms of promoting ASEAN, promoting discussions within ASEAN. And we very clearly told our friends in Laos that this is precisely what we are trying to do in order to support Laos’ chairmanship of ASEAN, engage ASEAN into more discussions with our friends around the world, trying to fill in the gaps of where Laos feels that they have not been capable of creating more discussions within ASEAN. And so they supported the idea. They participated. Lao prime minister came and opened the forum last year together with Vietnam's prime minister. And fortunately, the idea also was welcomed, maybe because of the merits of the idea itself, but maybe also because a little bit about they knew what the DAV was doing. And so they trusted the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam on this kind of business. And so many of our friends, ASEAN dialogue partners, supported the idea, and they came in person, and they also came sending video messages in order to support the initiative. And that's how the idea came about and got started. It got reflected, in the, as you said, joint communique of the ASEAN foreign ministers after the forum took place. And so that was a recognition by ASEAN that there was something valuable that they saw in this process. And they decided that they were going to support it if Vietnam were to do it again. And so here we are doing it for the second time.

And this time around, fortunately, we managed to convince Malaysia that this is also supportive of their ASEAN championship. And the prime minister of Malaysia is also coming in person in order to open the forum together with our prime minister again. And, this year, I'm happy to say that we received even more support from ASEAN and from the partners of ASEAN. More people, more leaders are coming in person. More ministers are coming in person. And we have a lot more sign ups for participation this year. So it shows that they do recognize that this kind of forum is the kind of thing that they enjoy at least participating – don't mind wasting their time and money to come and participate. And so they also find that they can take away a bit of valuable stuff participating in this kind of forum.

VALUE ADD, ASEAN FUTURE FORUM 2025 AND LONGER-TERM PROSPECTS

ASEAN Wonk: You're right to mention support and how valuable that is, given everyone's constraints on time and resources as well as the really contested nature of the geopolitical environment that we're in, which, as you noted, does elicit the need for more dialogue, not less. I wanted to ask a little bit about the content and the agenda. You hinted at it there about what is the value add of the ASEAN Future Forum. The agenda last year was wide-ranging, but there was a bit of a focus on some themes such as sustainability. And a lot of the dialogues, as you say, in the region – they've adjusted over time – there tends to have been a very strong security or defense focus, and, over time, the notion of security has evolved and expanded in the region such that virtually all Southeast Asian countries are trying to think about a more comprehensive notion of security. And so it seems like the ASEAN Future Forum is trying to take on some of these big picture issues and a more multi-dimensional approach to security that looks at not just the economy, but also the environment, climate issues, and some of these big picture geoeconomic developments as well. I wonder how you think about that in terms of content and value add that the ASEAN Future Forum is providing, and how you are thinking about the agenda moving forward?

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Okay. Now because it's the ASEAN Future Forum, therefore, it's very ASEAN-centric. We've designed the program so that ASEAN is the subject of discussion. ASEAN leads the discussion. ASEAN shows intellectual leadership in all of the sessions that we design. So in every session that we design, we always try to invite either a key ASEAN leader or key ASEAN scholar to take the lead in the discussion. We are also futuristic in designing the session. So we are looking at issues, emerging issues that are going to affect ASEAN's future or is going to affect ASEAN's business in the years to come.

We are also trying to be balanced, so we are not just security focused. We understand that ASEAN has very broad interests and not just security. And therefore, we try to tackle security, geopolitics, but also developmental issues. For example, this year, we do a lot of stuff on tech. We have two sessions dedicated to technologies and the future of technologies and how ASEAN can become tech resilient and how can ASEAN capture the opportunities that the tech revolution is bringing to the international community and especially to the region. So we try to be comprehensive. We're trying to be ASEAN centric. We're trying to be future proof, futuristic, and that's how we design the program. But we do not have a very fixed or very rigid agenda. The whole idea is to be flexible, to tackle the needs, to be supportive of the ASEAN chair. So we do observe what the ASEAN chair is trying to be supportive of and to complement the chair agenda. So the forum can be seen as an integral part of the ASEAN overall effort to drive the agenda of the region.

ASEAN Wonk: That sounds like a good balance there between the agenda in general and being flexible to the changing circumstances each year –the rotating chairmanships and also the changing circumstances in a very fast-moving world and region as well. I'm wondering if you could preview what we might expect in terms of the theme of this year's ASEAN Future Forum. What are some of the major topics and outcomes that you're looking for, and then also the expectations more generally for where this is headed in its second year?

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Okay. So this year, we've chosen the theme of building a united, inclusive, and resilient ASEAN amid a transforming world. So the context is a world that is changing very fast. And the question we're asking ourselves is how to build a strong, resilient ASEAN that is based on its unity and inclusivity. So that's the whole idea. We thought that that theme complements well Malaysia's chairmanship of ASEAN, which focuses on inclusivity and sustainability. So that obviously is supportive of the ASEAN chair.

We are going to discuss megatrends that are going to affect this region. We are going to leave it for the scholars and the keynote speakers to elaborate on what their thoughts are on the megatrends that we need to observe and what are those that are going to bring opportunities and challenges to ASEAN. We are going to ask everyone to revisit ASEAN's mechanics, ASEAN basic principles or fundamental principles, and see how ASEAN can become more agile and more adaptive to the current world. We are going to also look at subregional cooperation or essentially minilateralism and see how these synergies, these different mechanisms, can complement one another and support ASEAN multilateralism as a whole. We're going to look a lot at tech and how ASEAN can balance between being flexible and being innovative while having proper governance, proper regulations to govern the tech revolution. And we're also going to discuss geopolitics. We are going to discuss how ASEAN can bridge the divides given the world is becoming more fragmented – given the region or the Indo-Pacific is becoming more divided, more fragmented – and we'll see the relevance of ASEAN and how ASEAN can serve as a connector, honest broker that ASEAN has always tried to be. So essentially those are the main themes, main topics that we are going to discuss. And we are going have a lot of side events as well that tackle other topics such as women empowerment and so on and so forth. So we'll try to make it a rich and fruitful discussion, and everyone should find something of their interest participating in the forum.

VIETNAM NEW ERA OF NATIONAL RISE AND FUTURE FOREIGN POLICY OUTLOOK

ASEAN Wonk: I’m wondering if I could ask about the broader context in Vietnam. Vietnam is headed into its next party congress early next year. General Secretary To Lam has also been talking about – depending on which formulation you’re using – Vietnam entering a new era of national rise. And the major power environment as we’ve talked about is also shifting. We’ve got a new administration in in the United States, but also more broadly, shifting changes and conflicts in Europe and in the Middle East as well. Where do you see some of the changes amid the continuity in Vietnam's foreign policy headed in the coming year?

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Well the statement by General Secretary To Lam that the country is entering a new era marks the recognition of what everyone else in the world has been saying: that the world is at an inflection point. The world is transitioning to multipolarity. The world is changing and is not going back to what it was and so on and so forth. So everybody is saying that the world is different now. And so this is a recognition of the state of the world that is fast changing and is fast transforming into something that is not yet fully known.

Secondly, it's also an indication that the country is also transitioning to a different period. After four decades of what we call doi moi or renovation, the country has gained quite a bit and it is now ready to move on to a different stage of development, trying to shoot up the pace of development, trying to overcome the middle-income trap, trying to gear up to the upper layer of the supply chain. So the country is aiming higher after four decades of accumulation of relative economic foundation. He's aspiring the country to be more ambitious, to aim higher and to enter into a period of economic developments where you have to think differently and you also have to do things differently.

So the major change is mostly going to be in the way the country governs itself, in the way that the country relates to the environment that is changing outside, and the way in which the country is going to tap into the opportunities and tackle challenges outside. For example, on technology, and General Secretary To Lam is very keen on aspiring the country to take up the tech revolution that is happening in the world. He says that if we are not going to be able to tap into that revolution, we are going to forever be left behind, and you're never going to meet your target of becoming a higher upper income level or developed country by 2045. So you have to do things differently in order to tap into that. And the ASEAN Future Forum that we are doing is one of those exercises that we are trying to contribute into getting the country up on its feet in order to be able to take up or to join the tech race, if you might call it. And that's how he's trying to ask the country and its people to be different in the new era.

VIETNAM, MIDDLE POWER DIPLOMACY AND MIDDLEPOWERMANSHIP

ASEAN Wonk: And in that context, I'm wondering how we view Vietnam's convening of forums within this broader notion in Southeast Asia where countries are navigating this very contested geopolitical environment. Different countries have different names for it, but the essence is middlepowermanship or the idea of using agency to come up with new ideas and initiatives to be proactive in terms of how you're engaging. How do you see this as being part of Vietnam's own way of engaging actively in this foreign policy landscape and exerting its own entrepreneurship, if you will, as a power in its own right within Southeast Asia?

Dr. Nguyen Hung Son: Yeah, you may say it's an aspiration to act like a middle power…

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