The country you’re living in is doing better than the country you came from, and nobody’s mentioned it
A note for my fellow expats in Đà Lạt who have stopped reading the news for understandable reasons
I’ve had long conversations this week about where the world is heading. Trump, the midterms, the dollar, Rome, the slow leak of American hegemony, the lot. At some point in the middle of all that grand-strategic gloom, the question landed where it usually does for me these days, which is: yes, but what does any of this mean for the country I’m actually living in.
So here’s the news from Đà Lạt, by way of Hanoi, with a side trip through Washington. Because I suspect a lot of you have stopped reading anything that isn’t either a weather forecast or a property listing, and I don’t blame you, but the place you’ve chosen to grow old in is having a moment, and you should probably know about it.
Vietnam grew 8 percent last year. The United States is currently arguing about whether to hold an election
Let me start with the numbers, because the numbers are doing all the work and most people don’t believe them.
Vietnam’s GDP grew 8.02 percent in 2025. The fourth quarter alone hit 8.46 percent, the strongest quarter in fourteen years. Exports to the United States rose 28 percent, from $119 billion to $153 billion, despite Trump’s tariffs, which were supposed to crush the place. The trade surplus with America hit a record $134 billion. The 14th Party Congress, which wrapped up in late January, set a target of at least 10 percent annual growth for the next five years and committed the country to high-income status by 2045.
For context, the United States grew about 2.4 percent last year, the United Kingdom about 1.1, Australia about 1.4, and the eurozone scraped together something embarrassingly close to flat. The country your taxi driver lives in is growing four to five times faster than the country your pension is paid from. This is not a rounding error. This is an economy doing what South Korea did in the 1980s and what China did from 2000 onwards, except it’s happening to us, in real time, while I sit on my balcony complaining about the karaoke.
What’s actually going on, in a paragraph
Tô Lâm, the General Secretary, came up through the Public Security ministry, which in plain English means the secret police. He used an anti-corruption campaign to remove eight Politburo members between late 2022 and his own elevation in August 2024. That’s the most political instability Vietnam has had in thirty years, and he resolved it by quietly becoming the most powerful Vietnamese politician since Ho Chi Minh. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on which decade you’re standing in. Right now it looks like a feature. He’s pushed through the most ambitious bureaucratic and economic reforms since Đổi Mới in 1986, merged provinces, folded ministries together, and pointed the entire machinery of state at one job: escape the middle-income trap before the demographics turn. He’s calling it the Streamlining Revolution, which sounds like something a McKinsey consultant came up with, but the Vietnamese version of McKinsey works for the Party, so the comparison breaks down quickly.
The strategy is straightforward and, to my eyes, considerably smarter than what most Western governments are currently attempting. Move from low-value assembly to higher-value manufacturing. Build the digital economy until it’s 30 percent of GDP. Spend big on infrastructure — public investment was up 27 percent in 2025. Designate the private sector the “driving force” of development while the state keeps the “leading role,” which is a formula that papers over an enormous philosophical tension but means in practice that if you’re a private business doing something the state approves of, you’ll get capital, permits, and runway. Hedge ruthlessly between the United States and China, take FDI from anyone who’ll write a cheque, and never, ever pick a side.
Compare that to the country most of us came from. Twenty-year planning horizons versus the next election. Infrastructure spending up 27 percent versus crumbling roads and an electricity grid held together with hope. A government that has decided it wants to be South Korea by 2045 and is putting its shoulder to the task, versus a government that has decided it wants to relitigate 1955 and is putting its shoulder to that.
The Trump complication, briefly
Yes, Trump slapped a 20 percent tariff on Vietnamese goods, with an extra 40 percent on anything that looks suspiciously like Chinese stuff being routed through Hai Phong port. Yes, this is humiliating, asymmetrical, and bad for Vietnamese exporters in textiles, footwear, and electronics. And yes, it has done absolutely sod all to slow the country down. Exports to America grew 28 percent anyway. The reason is structural and worth understanding: Nike isn’t moving its factories back to Ohio, Apple isn’t going to assemble iPhones in Texas, and the alternative locations — Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh — face similar tariffs without Vietnam’s logistics, workforce, or political stability. The tariff hurts. It doesn’t redirect.
The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariff authority in February. The replacement Section 122 tariffs are weaker and time-limited. Vietnam’s negotiators, who are some of the most underrated diplomats on the planet, are quietly using this as leverage. The 10 percent growth target for 2026 is probably ambitious. The 6 to 8 percent likely outcome would still be the envy of every country whose passport you’re holding.
What happens to Vietnam if Trump goes, and what happens if he stays
Two scenarios, briefly.
If Trump goes — meaning he loses Congress in November, faces two years of investigations, and is succeeded in 2028 by something more conventional — Vietnam does very well indeed. Tariffs come down or get renegotiated. American capital, which has been hedging, commits properly. The China-plus-one strategy that’s already brought Samsung, Intel, and a thousand mid-tier manufacturers here accelerates. The 10 percent target becomes plausible. Property values in the cities Vietnamese growth actually flows through — Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, Da Nang, and yes, eventually, our hill town — keep going up. You get a country that looks recognisably like South Korea around 1995, modernising at speed, with a middle class that expects more.
If Trump stays — meaning the midterms get bent, he keeps Congress, and the dollar continues to be used as a coercion tool against allies and rivals alike — Vietnam’s path gets bumpier but not catastrophic. The growth rate probably drops to 6 or 7 percent. Foreign capital becomes more cautious, more conditional, more inclined to demand sweeteners. The middle-income trap stays a real risk. But Vietnam grows. It grows because the alternatives to manufacturing here are worse, because China is still next door buying everything that isn’t nailed down, because the European Union signed a free trade deal in 2020 and would dearly like to keep using it, and because the Vietnamese government has been preparing for exactly this kind of multipolar mess for longer than most Western analysts have been paying attention.
The thing to understand is that Vietnam’s growth story does not depend on America being friendly. It depends on America being one of several large customers, which it remains. The country has spent the last decade building optionality, and it’s now collecting the dividend.
The risks, because I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t mention them
Four things are worth your attention if you’re investing here, and given the rest of you reading this are probably parked in property, mutual funds, a pho cart on the corner of Phan Đình Phùng, or some combination of all three, you should know what they are.
First, the political concentration under Tô Lâm. One-man rule is efficient when the man is competent and disastrous when succession goes wrong. Vietnam ran on collective leadership for forty years precisely because the Party studied what happened to China under Mao and the Soviet Union under Stalin. The shift toward Tô Lâm’s centralisation is being celebrated now because growth is strong, but the structural risk is a bad decision made quickly with no internal check. The next succession crisis, whenever it comes, will be the test.
Second, the property and credit sectors. Vietnamese banks have significant exposure to real estate developers, the regulatory framework around lending is opaque even by emerging-market standards, and the kind of Evergrande-style risk that nearly took down the Chinese economy in 2023 is not impossible here. If you’re putting money into Vietnamese property funds or developer bonds, the visible yields are attractive precisely because the hidden risks are non-trivial. Diversified mutual funds with proper management are a different animal and considerably safer.
Third, the demographic window. Vietnam still has a young population, but the fertility rate has dropped below replacement and the country is ageing faster than it’s getting rich. The window in which a youthful workforce powers the growth engine probably closes around 2035. Everything in the 14th Congress documents is implicitly racing against that clock. They have ten years to escape the middle-income trap before the demographics turn against them. They know this. The plan is built around it. Whether the plan survives contact with reality is the open question.
Fourth, and this is the one most expats discover the hard way, regulatory unpredictability for foreigners. Land use rights for non-citizens remain a moving target. Capital controls mean repatriating money out of Vietnam is meaningfully harder than getting it in. Tax residency rules shift with each five-year plan. The country is open to foreign investment, genuinely so, but the rules are written for a Vietnamese context and applied to expats with a kind of bureaucratic cheerfulness that can feel personal but isn’t. If you haven’t already got a competent local lawyer in your life — meaning one who actually understands the gap between the written law and the practiced law — get one. Mine is worth her weight in gold and the gold market is currently bonkers.
What this means for those of us in Đà Lạt specifically
The Central Highlands are getting infrastructure investment for the first time in a generation. The new airport near Ho Chi Minh City, which opened in December, cuts the time from Saigon to Đà Lạt for inbound visitors, which is the thing the local economy actually runs on. Đà Lạt’s positioning as a domestic tourism centre, a temperate-climate agricultural hub, a coffee-growing region with a real story, and an increasingly fashionable retreat for Vietnamese professionals priced out of Saigon gives it a different risk profile from the saturated coastal cities. Property here is not Phu Quoc. It’s not Da Nang. It moves slowly, but it moves up, and the people moving in are increasingly the kind of Vietnamese middle class who have options and are choosing here.
The honest summary is this. The country we’re living in is doing the thing successful Asian economies do — building hard, investing in human capital, hedging great-power tensions, and tolerating a political model that the West finds uncomfortable in exchange for getting things done. It will probably grow at 6 to 9 percent for the rest of the decade depending on what happens in Washington. It will probably overtake the Philippines and Malaysia in per-capita income within ten years. It will probably remain a one-party state with growing tolerance for private wealth and shrinking tolerance for political dissent. Whether that’s a country you want to grow old in is a separate question from whether it’s a country worth investing in. The investment case is strong. The civic case requires you to make peace with a system that doesn’t care what you think and isn’t pretending otherwise.
The cosmic footnote
The universe spent 13.8 billion years producing a planet on which a small group of people sitting in a hill town in the Central Highlands of Vietnam can have a conversation about whether their adopted country is going to overtake the per-capita income of their birth country before they die. Twenty years ago this would have been a joke. Forty years ago it would have been incomprehensible. The thing about decline and rise is that they happen on different clocks, and the clock you’re watching depends on which country you’re standing in.
We chose well, my friends. The place we landed is going somewhere. The place we left is having an argument about whether it still wants to exist as a coherent country.
Have Ms Ha pour another coffee. The view from Đà Lạt is better than you think.
A note on sources for the curious: GDP figures from the Vietnamese General Statistics Office and Bloomberg. Trade and tariff data from the Council on Foreign Relations and The Diplomat. Party Congress analysis from the Stimson Center, Council on Foreign Relations, and AsiaNews. Anything wrong is mine. Anything right is borrowed.