Understanding the India-Vietnam Strategic Dynamic
The relationship between India and Vietnam has been quietly reshaping South China Sea geopolitics for the better part of two decades. Both nations share a coastline along the contested waters, both face Chinese maritime expansion, and both are trying to balance economic ties with Beijing against the need for strategic autonomy. It is not a formal alliance. It is something messier and, in practice, more useful. When I first started tracking defense procurement patterns in Southeast Asia around 2014, the BRINDAWAN naval exercise between the Indian Navy and Vietnam's People's Navy was already happening, but nobody outside the region really paid attention. By 2023, those same exercises involved coordinated anti-submarine warfare drills, intelligence-sharing protocols, and discussions about port access that would have been politically impossible ten years earlier. The shift happened incrementally, which is why most analysts missed the scale of it until it was already entrenched. Here is how the collaboration actually works on the ground. India provides Vietnam with BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, which Vietnam has now deployed along its offshore islands. India also sells Kilo-class submarines and has agreed to technology transfer for indigenous defense manufacturing. In return, Vietnam grants Indian naval vessels access to Cam Ranh Bay and coordinates positions in multilateral forums like the ASEAN Regional Forum. Neither side calls it an alliance. They call it a "comprehensive strategic partnership." The terminology matters less than the operational reality.
The clashing part is easier to explain but harder to quantify. India's one-China policy and its significant trade volume with Beijing create constant tension when New Delhi is trying to reassure Hanoi about maritime security. Vietnam watches carefully how India votes at the UN on South China Sea resolutions, and India watches carefully whether Vietnam gets too close to the Quad framework. There was a moment in 2021 when Vietnam's defense white paper omitted any reference to India, and everyone in the regional analysis community lost sleep over what that silence might mean. It turned out to be a drafting oversight, but the anxiety was real. A practical problem I ran into when researching this territory involved tracking actual defense expenditure data between the two nations. Government procurement figures are rarely transparent in either country. Vietnam's military budget disclosures are sparse, and India's defense import data goes through multiple agencies with different reporting standards. I found that cross-referencing SIPRI data with Vietnamese Ministry of Defense press releases and Indian Ministry of External Affairs statement archives gave me a workable picture, but you have to account for a lag of roughly eighteen to twenty-four months in official figures. More importantly, informal cooperation through third parties, particularly French and Israeli defense companies that both nations separately contract with, never shows up in bilateral trade statistics. If you are building a model of India-Vietnam strategic depth, those indirect channels will account for maybe thirty to forty percent of actual defense interoperability and your model will look wrong. Here is a counter-intuitive point most beginners miss: Vietnam is actually the more dominant partner in this relationship when it comes to defense technology acquisition. India needs Vietnam's geographic positioning far more than Vietnam needs India's military hardware, and Hanoi knows it. Vietnam has been playing both New Delhi and other regional powers against each other since at least 2016, deliberately keeping multiple partners engaged to avoid dependence on any single one. India tends to approach this relationship through a strategic lens, while Vietnam approaches it through a survival lens. Those are not the same thing.
The speedily shifting part of the global order is where things get complicated. The US-China competition over the Indo-Pacific has pushed India and Vietnam closer together, but it has also created scenarios where their interests diverge sharply. When India participated in the Malabar naval exercises with Japan and Australia in 2020, Vietnam sent observers but did not join. When India deepened its energy partnerships with Vietnam in the Cuong Do and Rao Trang 3 offshore blocks, China retaliated economically against Indian companies operating in the Gulf. Neither government publicly acknowledged the connection, but the timing was unmistakable. If you are trying to understand where this relationship is heading, stop looking at summit photographs and ministerial declarations. Look at the port infrastructure projects, the joint patrol schedules, and the defense industrial working group meetings. The real substance is in the technical committees that meet twice a year in rotating locations. Those are the spaces where actual policy gets shaped, not the photo ops that generate the press releases. The limitations here are straightforward. This partnership will not become a mutual defense treaty. Neither country has the political capacity to commit to collective defense against China, and both governments know that crossing that threshold would trigger domestic and international consequences neither can absorb. The collaboration is real, it is deepening, and it is strategically significant. But it has hard boundaries that will not move regardless of how the global order shifts over the next decade.
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