Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership

Strategic partnership and comprehensive partnership are phrases that regularly designate diplomatic relations between two countries. Relations range from bilateral partners, regional partners, to comprehensive partners, and strategic partners. By 2013, although there had been 10 strategic partnerships established over the previous 10 years, Vietnamese foreign policy makers had not yet come up with a clear definition of the concept. In an interview with the Government Newspaper in 2015, Mr. Tran Viet Thai, Deputy Director of the Institute of Strategic Studies, Diplomatic Academy, reported: Vietnam has 5 comprehensive strategic partners, 15 strategic partners. Strategic and 12 comprehensive partners. According to master Le Hong Hiep, a relationship should be considered "strategic" for Vietnam only if it has particularly important implications for Vietnam's security, prosperity, and international position. Of these three aspects, the two aspects of security and prosperity must be the two essential aspects, while the last aspect is only of secondary significance.