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A Second Vietnam War? Hanoi Waits and Prepares

By José Niño | The Libertarian Institute | March 9, 2026

On the surface, everything between Vietnam and the United States looked better than it ever had. In September 2023, President Joe Biden and General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, elevating relations to their highest diplomatic tier. American officials toasted prosperity. Vietnamese leaders smiled for cameras. The messaging suggested a new chapter in a relationship once defined by napalm and body counts.

Then, in early February 2026, a very different story emerged from behind the curtain. The 88 Project, a U.S.-based human rights organization focused on Vietnam, exposed a classified internal military document that shattered the diplomatic facade. The revelation was subsequently covered by AP News, The Diplomat, and Le Monde. Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

The document bore the formal designation 357/KH-BTL and carried the title “The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan.” Signed by Vice Admiral Tran Thanh Nghiem and certified by Rear Admiral Vu Van Nam, it was issued by Vietnam’s Navy Command in August 2024, months before Donald Trump returned to office for his second term. Its contents painted a picture of a government that publicly embraced Washington while privately treating it as the gravest threat to its survival.

Vietnamese military planners described the United States in the document as a “belligerent” superpower with a pattern of “creating a pretext” to launch wars against nations that “deviate from its orbit.” The plan acknowledged that the present risk of armed conflict remained low, yet insisted that America’s aggressive nature demanded constant vigilance.

The operational scenarios imagined within the plan read like something from a Cold War thriller. Vietnamese planners envisioned a full-scale American assault involving two to three aircraft carrier strike groups, three to four Marine brigades, and amphibious landings along the country’s vast coastline. In the most alarming passage, the document speculated that if conventional methods failed, the United States “may use biochemical and tactical nuclear weapons.”

Vietnamese analysts traced what they saw as an escalating pattern across three administrations. They pointed to President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia, Trump’s first term (described as inciting an arms race), and Biden’s institutionalization of the Indo-Pacific Strategy. All of it, according to Le Monde, was portrayed as Washington forging a united front against China.

Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project and author of the analysis, emphasized that this thinking was not confined to one paranoid faction. “There’s a consensus here across the government and across different ministries,” he told AP News. “This isn’t just some kind of a fringe element or paranoid element within the party or within the government.”

Perhaps the most revealing element in the plan was how Vietnam’s military ranked its adversaries. According to The Vietnamese Magazine’s analysis, China occupied the position of a “Category 3” adversary. That meant Beijing was seen as a territorial rival that contested borders and maritime claims but did not threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power.

The United States occupied a far more dangerous position. American power was classified under “Category 1” and “Category 2” designations, meaning Washington represented an existential threat to the regime itself. In the eyes of Vietnamese military planners, China wanted territory. America wanted the party gone.

This distinction carried explosive implications. Nguyen Khac Giang of Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, speaking about the Communist Party’s conservative and military-aligned faction, told AP News that the military had “never been too comfortable moving ahead with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the United States.” The tensions had already surfaced publicly in June 2024, when an army television report accused the American-linked Fulbright University of fomenting a “color revolution.” The Foreign Ministry defended the university, which American and Vietnamese officials had highlighted when the two countries upgraded ties, but the episode revealed how deep institutional suspicion ran.

The most dangerous element in the leaked plan was never the fantasy of aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. It was the way the document conflated civil society with warfare. Vietnamese planners drew explicit parallels to Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and the Philippines’ 1986 Yellow Revolution, portraying the American promotion of freedom, democracy, and human rights as opening salvos designed to “undermine and ultimately dismantle Vietnam’s socialist political system.”

By branding activists, journalists, and pro-democracy reformers as foot soldiers in a CIA-directed Color Revolution, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) used this subversion as a pretext to justify a major domestic crackdown. Starting around 2020, the CPV mobilized all branches of government to “prevent the US and its allies from fomenting a color revolution in the country,” according to a report by Le Monde. Advocacy for religious freedom or labor rights became, in the party’s framing, acts of war.

None of this meant Vietnam was irrational, or even unusual. Military contingency planning for worst-case scenarios is standard practice everywhere. Even the leaked document itself acknowledged that war remained “low risk.” The United States maintains its own history of drafting invasion plans against allies, from “War Plan Red” for Canada in the 1930s to plans to seize Middle Eastern oil fields in 1973. The “Hague Invasion Act” of 2002, still active, authorizes the president to use military force to free U.S. personnel held by the International Criminal Court. Washington’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 only deepened Vietnamese fears that the pattern was accelerating.

Vietnam’s foreign policy framework reflected this pragmatic paranoia. Hanoi’s famous “Four Nos” defense policy, reaffirmed by Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính in August 2023, pledged no participation in military alliances, no siding with one country against another, no foreign military bases on Vietnamese soil, and no use or threat of force in international relations. Under this doctrine, Vietnam maintained comprehensive strategic partnerships with the United States, China, and Russia simultaneously. The approach, often described as “bamboo diplomacy” after a metaphor coined by the late General Secretary Trọng, allowed Hanoi to bend with shifting geopolitical winds without breaking.

The history of the Vietnam War gave these calculations a visceral dimension. The conflict killed approximately 3.1 million Vietnamese people according to the government’s own 1995 estimates, including roughly two million civilians. The National Archives records 58,220 American military fatalities. That staggering asymmetry reflected the reality of a war fought entirely on Vietnamese soil with industrial-scale firepower. For Vietnamese military planners, the idea of a second American invasion was not a paranoid abstraction. It was a memory that shaped every calculation they made.

It doesn’t help that the United States has a long track record of intervening and destabilizing countries in all corners of the globe. Such a track record of U.S. perfidy is being considered by Vietnamese strategists. Washington will dismiss this document as the paranoia of aging generals. Hanoi will pretend it never existed. But somewhere between the diplomatic toasts and the classified war games, the truth sits undisturbed. Vietnam remembers what America did the first time. And with a track record of interventions stretching from Guatemala to Venezuela, the United States has given Hanoi every reason to believe it could happen again.

March 9, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | , , | Comments Off on A Second Vietnam War? Hanoi Waits and Prepares