To Lam's Brussels visit this week is a victory lap for a relationship where Vietnam has captured almost every structural advantage. Since the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement took effect in August 2020, Hanoi has secured preferential access to the world's largest single market, upgraded to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in January 2025, and just signed a separate deal with EFTA states. In return, Brussels has received a widening goods-trade deficit — €51.7 billion in 2025, more than double the €24 billion in 2019 — and a partner that has failed to ratify the ILO convention on freedom of association it promised to adopt. The human rights dimension is not a footnote. Twelve international rights organizations wrote to Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa this week warning that repression has intensified under To Lam, who ran Vietnam's public security ministry before taking power. Independent trade unions remain banned. Independent journalism is suppressed. The EU's response to these repeated breaches of EVFTA-linked obligations has been to reward Hanoi with a diplomatic upgrade, not to trigger any enforcement mechanism. The strategic logic is transparent: Brussels needs Vietnam as a China de-risking node. Several European states have signed defense agreements with Hanoi, and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas held talks on South China Sea security cooperation this week. In the EU's geopolitical calculus, a manufacturing alternative to China that cooperates on Indo-Pacific security is worth more than labor-rights compliance. That calculation has a price, and it is paid by Vietnamese workers and civil society. The trade architecture itself is lopsided in distribution. Large foreign-invested manufacturers and established exporters capture the bulk of tariff reductions. Smaller Vietnamese domestic firms lack resources to navigate EU import requirements, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and deforestation regulations. The EVFTA's benefits, as Stockholm University researcher Hai Thiem Bui notes, have been 'distributed unevenly across sectors, firms, and social groups.' European businesses, meanwhile, have seen their exports to Vietnam grow far more slowly than Vietnamese exports to Europe. The Investment Protection Agreement, signed in 2019, remains unratified by France, the Netherlands, and several other member states. Germany ratified in February 2025 and Poland in April, but without broader ratification the legal framework for European investors remains weaker than the market-access framework Vietnam already enjoys. This asymmetry means European capital flows into Vietnam with less legal protection than Vietnamese goods flow into Europe. The next phase will test whether Brussels treats its own commitments as binding. Vietnam faces growing EU regulatory demands — carbon border adjustments, deforestation rules, sustainability standards — that could become de facto enforcement mechanisms where diplomatic pressure has failed. But the structural incentive runs the other way: with American tariff wars making alternative supply chains urgent, the EU needs Vietnam more than Vietnam needs to reform. The 20-year trajectory is clear. If this pattern holds, Vietnam becomes a deeply embedded EU supply-chain dependency with no meaningful labor or rights conditionality, replicating the exact dynamic Brussels claims to be escaping by de-risking from China. The leverage window for reform is now; it closes as integration deepens.
