ABSTRACT
The Vietnamese Communist Party’s (VCP) perception of its external security environment, while relaxing somewhat under the impact of globalization, periodically reverts to the more familiar Communist refrain about externally assisted internal subversion. Thus the above statement by an officer to the author at the National Defense Academy in Hanoi in spring 2005. Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense formalized these kinds of concerns in its 2004 White Paper on defense: ‘Vietnam is facing the threat of schemes and ploys by external hostile elements in collusion with internal reactionaries to interfere in Vietnam’s internal affairs and to cause sociopolitical instability in Vietnam’.1
