The Vietnamese government restricted, and sometimes outright blocked, access to Facebook in the country from Sunday to Wednesday of this week during President Obama’s visit, say two activists groups who spoke with Reuters. That facility used to be a major USA operating base during the Vietnam War and Russian Federation leased and expanded it throughout the 1980s and 1990s before leaving in 2002.
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Ngoc added that it is also the result of Vietnam’s policy of ‘rising above the past, overcoming differences, promoting shared interests, and looking towards the future, ‘ a message Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong sent to Obama during their July 2015 White House meeting.
The president made the announcement at a Hanoi press conference, which ended a half-century ban on USA arms sales to Vietnam, putting to rest one of the last foreign policy vestiges of one of the most divisive wars in American history.
Vietnam is a singularly important party in the dispute over the South China Sea, so Washington is keen to help develop the country into a more robust check on China’s maritime expansion. Already President Tran Dai Quang has promised the U.S. Navy more access to valuable ports.
But unless Beijing reined in its conduct in the South China Sea, it was unlikely to alter the region’s efforts to side with America to balance China’s influence, he said. But the two nations are at odds over China’s claims of territory.
Obama arrived there from Vietnam, where he formally reset the relationship with Washington’s former foe by lifting an arms embargo, four decades after the USA withdrew its last troops from the country.
While the summit wasn’t expected to produce any breakthroughs, it gives leaders a rare opportunity to talk through the intractable difficulties they confront. The lifting of the arms sales ban underscores how much things have changed in the last half century. Adm.
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Obama also was one of the “very few guests” on Bourdain’s show who asked the camera crew if they got to eat too.
