On his just completed trip to Asia, President Barack Obama announced in Hanoi that he was ending the decades-old embargo on U.S. arms sales to Vietnam, one of the last regional policy relics of the Cold War.
Although he denied that the shift was part of any deliberate "containment" policy, as China has charged, Beijing certainly interpreted it as such. As rivalries over conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea continue to preoccupy the U.S., China and some Southeast Asian states including Vietnam, the lifting of the arms sales prohibition was seen by some as a further element of the Obama "pivot" -- which was designed, as U.S. policy has been for a century and a half, to prevent the rise of any hegemonic power in East Asia. (Courtesy of asia.nikkei.com)
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