At the end of this week, Marc Knapper, the current U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, will conclude his four-year tenure in the country. Knapper was one of 29 career ambassadors who were recalled to Washington by the Trump administration just before Christmas, all of whom were appointed under President Joe Biden.
Politico, which first reported the recall, described it as “unusual,” stating that career diplomats, unlike political appointees, are “typically allowed to continue serving” after changes in administration.
It quoted Secretary of State Marco Rubio as saying that the U.S. needed a “complete recalibration” of U.S. foreign policy to account for the fact that “the world has dramatically changed.” “Many of the institutions, policies, assumptions that our foreign policy was operating under were built upon a world that no longer existed, and it required us to re-examine that,” he added.
In Vietnam, Knapper’s designated successor is another career diplomat, Jennifer Wicks McNamara, who is awaiting U.S. Senate confirmation after being nominated in October. During her confirmation hearing on December 11, McNamara said that she would focus on rectifying the trade relationship between Vietnam and the U.S., a core priority of the Trump administration.
“The current trade relationship is imbalanced,” Wicks told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month. If confirmed, she promised to “promote equitable market access for U.S. goods and services, including technology, energy, and agricultural products; support the development of resilient, diversified supply chains; and encourage Vietnamese investment in the United States.”
It is possible that Wicks’ confirmation pledge is “America first” boilerplate designed to secure her confirmation by the Senate. But if she does intend to prioritize the trade imbalance, the new ambassador will have her work cut out for her. Despite the imposition in August of a 20 percent tariff on Vietnamese goods, which was intended to reduce Vietnam’s large trade surplus with the United States, the country’s trade surplus with the U.S. has continued to swell. Vietnamese exports to the U.S. rose from $119.6 billion in 2024 to $153.2 billion last year, an increase of 28 percent, according to Vietnamese government figures. This has pushed the surplus out to a record of nearly $134 billion in 2025, considerably higher than in 2024.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which calculates its own figures, valued the Vietnamese trade surplus at $123.5 billion in 2024. It has not yet released figures for the whole of 2025, but according to Reuters, the latest U.S. statistics show Vietnam’s January to October trade surplus in goods reached $144.2 billion, an amount already surpassing its full-year 2024 record. Remarkably, this surplus was higher than China’s in the second and third quarters of 2025, putting Vietnam behind only Mexico.
With the new U.S. ambassador promising to make this trade imbalance a core priority of her mission, U.S.-Vietnam relations could be set for another period of turbulence. The two nations remain locked in negotiations over a final trade agreement, and it is hard to imagine that the growing surplus will not become a subject of contention during the talks.
This could conceivably lead the U.S. government to reopen negotiations over the tariff rate, which was initially set at 46 percent in Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement last April before being reduced to 20 percent. Adam Samdin, an economist at Oxford Economics told Reuters that the U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam leaves Hanoi “vulnerable.”
“The administration still has multiple avenues to re-escalate tariff rates,” he said.
The U.S. could also focus on the issue of transshipped goods, which Washington says will be hit with a larger 40 percent tariff. Trump’s hawkish trade advisors have long argued that large volumes of Chinese goods are shipped through Vietnam, or manufactured there with few added inputs, in order to avoid U.S. tariffs on China.
Given the junctural position that Vietnam occupies in the manufacturing supply chains linking China and the U.S., in which the country’s massive trade surplus is closely matched by a huge trade deficit with China, a large proportion of Vietnamese exports to the U.S. could conceivably fall under this designation. The question of how transshipped goods are defined and tariffed is therefore literally a billion-dollar question.
In any event, any genuine U.S. attempt to force down the trade deficit with Vietnam is likely to introduce an element of instability into one of its most important relationships in Southeast Asia.
