The opening session of the Shangri-La Dialogue on May 29, 2026, captured the central tension in Vietnam’s diplomacy. Tô Lâm, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam and State President, spoke of a rules-based order, strategic trust, preventive diplomacy, and ASEAN centrality. Yet he is also the clearest embodiment of concentrated party-state authority in modern Vietnam. The point is not simply that “big-man” leadership and middle-power language coexist. It is that concentrated leadership amplifies an older diplomatic line and makes its success depend on whether personal authority can be converted into institutions.
Lâm became State President in May 2024, became General Secretary after Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s death, and briefly held both offices before the presidency passed to Lương Cường. In January 2026 he was re-elected General Secretary, and on April 7 the National Assembly elected him State President again for a five-year term. The dual role has precedents, but of a different kind. Nguyễn Phú Trọng held both the party leadership and the presidency after Trần Đại Quang’s death in 2018 and relinquished the presidency in 2021; earlier, Trường Chinh held the head-of-state office as Chairman of the Council of State and briefly returned to the party leadership in 1986. Those cases were exceptional or transitional. Lâm’s restored dual role, by contrast, was incorporated into the post-congress leadership arrangement for a regular term — a more formalized concentration of party-state representation in one person.
“Big man” is not used here in the strict anthropological sense of patronage-based rule. It is used more narrowly: a leader who weakens the balance of collective leadership and concentrates the symbolic authority of party and state in one person. Concentration did not invent Vietnam’s foreign policy. That line — the flexibility, diversification, and multi-directional balancing later framed as ‘bamboo diplomacy’ — long predates Lâm. What concentration changes is tempo, coherence, and ownership. A single leader can push an agenda faster, frame it more sharply, and attach it to his own authority. But the same concentration can later erode the credibility of a state that appeals abroad to rules, institutions, and trust.
From Balancing to Shaping
Lâm’s Shangri-La address made this dual effect visible. He diagnosed today’s instability as a convergence of three crises: international order, development models, and strategic trust. Small and medium-sized states, he argued, face pressure to choose sides and coercion across economic, technological, financial, and security domains. He also framed development not as secondary to security but as the foundation of enduring security. The speech was therefore not only about military risk; it placed economic and developmental security at its core.
The key shift in the speech was rhetorical: from balancing to shaping. Lâm did not merely endorse a rules-based order. He argued that rules acquire meaning only when translated into operational mechanisms: early warning, emergency communication, incident-management protocols, self-restraint, and verifiable action. He called for a move from passive response to proactive shaping, from reiterating principles to operationalizing mechanisms, and from post-crisis management to risk mitigation. This was a statement of intent, not yet a record of implementation.
That intent is not new, and its lineage is the key to the big-man question. As Khang Pham notes, Vietnam has used the Shangri-La Dialogue since Nguyễn Tấn Dũng’s 2013 keynote to widen its space in regional security discourse through “strategic trust (lòng tin chiến lược) ” and non-traditional security. The vocabulary therefore predates Lâm’s concentration of power and matured under collective leadership. Big-man leadership is not authorship but amplification. The difference is one of emphasis and discipline: where Nguyễn Tấn Dũng named the United States and China directly in 2013, Lâm in 2026 spoke only of “partners with significant influence within and beyond the region,” criticizing coercion, unilateralism, fait accompli tactics, and the weaponization of trade and technology without naming either great power. The agenda grew broader, the attribution of blame more disciplined, and the voice more concentrated.
This is where the middle-power lens matters. Managing China and balancing relations with the United States is hedging; it is not, by itself, middle-power diplomacy. In behavioral accounts of middle powers, such diplomacy emerges when a state converts limited capabilities into agenda-setting, convening, norm entrepreneurship, institutional design, and confidence-building. Vietnam’s own middle-power scholarship is cautious. Lê Đình Tĩnh argues that Vietnam may meet the basic criteria of a middle power after 2030. Vũ Thị Thu Ngân describes Vietnam as an “incomplete middle power”: capable and diplomatically active, but lacking settled self-perception and regional recognition. The claim here is narrower than full status. Before the label is settled, Lâm is performing part of the role.
Lâm did not call Vietnam a middle power. Instead, he performed one defining middle-power behavior: agenda-setting. He proposed mechanisms for a rules-based order, warned that ASEAN centrality cannot be taken for granted, and placed AI, cyber governance, undersea cables, critical data infrastructure, defense-technology norms, disinformation, and social polarization on the security agenda, while calling for preventive diplomacy to become a regional strategic capability. Agenda-setting is behavior, not mere speech. But it remains incomplete until other actors adopt the agenda.
From Personal Authority to Institutional Conversion
The Q&A session and the Political Report to the 14th National Party Congress show why this agenda is inseparable from domestic reform. Lâm said bureaucratic streamlining and stronger governance do not change Vietnam’s foreign policy line; they are meant to make independence, self-reliance, multilateralization, and diversification more effective. The Political Report sets goals of upper-middle-income industrial status by 2030 and high-income developed status by 2045, while identifying semiconductors, AI, nuclear technology, new energy, space, and quantum technology as strategic technologies. Shangri-La translated that domestic agenda into security language: technology and development became questions of strategic stability. For Lâm, the world stage and the home front are never truly separate; every diplomatic act is also a domestic political act. That is the strength of concentrated leadership, but also its credibility risk: rules-based diplomacy becomes more persuasive only if it outlives the leader who voices it.
The post-April diplomatic sequence should be read in that light, not as a separate debate over whether Vietnam is tilting toward China. Lâm’s state visit to China on April 14–17, 2026, the signing of 32 cooperation documents, and the later upgrade of Vietnam–Philippines ties in Manila on June 1 form one pattern: manage the largest risk first, then widen the diplomatic field. The China visit alone could suggest accommodation. But the Manila upgrade — with its emphasis on maritime security, South China Sea stability, freedom of navigation and overflight, UNCLOS, and a rules-based order — together with Lâm’s Q&A reaffirmation of the “Four No’s” defense policy, makes a simple pro-Beijing reading hard to sustain. The sequence shows hedging, but also more than hedging: it links risk containment to regional agenda-setting.
Tô Lâm’s diplomacy is therefore best understood as the amplification of an established line by concentrated leadership. As Lê Hồng Hiệp argues, Lâm’s diplomatic offensive serves three ends at once: leadership legitimation, economic development, and geopolitical risk management. Concentration explains the intensity, speed, and singular voice of that offensive rather than its substance. Economic diplomacy is central, but the agenda cannot be reduced to economics alone.
The success of this strategy will not be measured by the frequency of summits or the number of documents signed. Thirty-two documents with China and an upgraded partnership with the Philippines are signals, not achievements. The test is institutionalization: whether early warning, emergency communication, maritime incident management, AI and cyber norms, undersea-cable protection, and preventive diplomacy become standing ASEAN or bilateral arrangements with agreed procedures. A binding incident-management protocol would count. Another memorandum would not.
The risks are equally clear. A state that appeals to rules abroad while personalizing authority at home is open to the charge of inconsistency. Cooperation with China through strategic dialogue, railways, supply chains, and digital technology may function as risk management, but it may also be read externally as strategic ambiguity or accommodation. And Vietnam’s middle-power identity is not automatically accepted within ASEAN; Vũ Thị Thu Ngân’s point remains decisive: Vietnam performs middle-power roles, but its official self-identification and recognition by neighbors remain incomplete.
Lâm’s Shangri-La speech was not the moment Vietnam declared itself a middle power. Vietnam still avoids the label. Yet Lâm opened a policy space in which Vietnam can act like one: not merely to survive between great powers, but to shape some of the conditions of competition through non-traditional security, technology norms, societal resilience, preventive diplomacy, and ASEAN centrality. The real test of “big-man” Tô Lâm is not the scale of his power, but its conversion. Can concentrated authority become durable institutions that strengthen Vietnam’s strategic autonomy, regional public-goods provision, and technology-development diplomacy? The bamboo stalk is growing thicker. Whether it becomes a forest will depend on institutionalization.