This article reassesses Vietnam’s ‘bamboo diplomacy’ as a recent discursive codification of a longer foreign-policy repertoire rather than as a label that can be projected uncritically across the entire 1995–2025 period. The article asks how Vietnam’s foreign-policy identity affects instrument choice under pressure from major-power competition, maritime security risk and economic dependence. It treats identity as the independent variable, operationalized through the durable principles of independence, self-reliance, national-interest primacy, multilateralization, diversification and non-alliance. Instrument choice is treated as the dependent variable and observed through three pathways: institutional anchoring, partner diversification and legal-discursive framing. Combining process tracing across the critical junctures of 1995, 2014 and 2023 with directed content analysis and event indicators, the article shows that Vietnam does not merely hedge in a generic sense. Instead, identity-based constraints filter the instruments that Hanoi can legitimately and sustainably use: when external pressure intensifies, Vietnam tends to deepen institutional commitments, widen partner networks and foreground international law rather than move toward formal alliance or bandwagoning. The article contributes a modest, testable framework for studying Vietnamese foreign policy and middle-power diplomacy in Southeast Asia.
Nam et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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