Unlocked: this issue first went to Pro subscribers on July 21, 2026. Mekong Brief issues open to everyone 60 days after publication. Pro members read them the day they land -- upgrade here.

For most of 2026 the US-Vietnam negotiation has been legible as an argument about a number. Greer's July 16 remarks moved it somewhere else. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, the Trade Representative said Washington wants more from Hanoi on non-tariff barriers, on economic security cooperation, and on intellectual property after months of talks that have not closed. On the export-control point he was specific: high-tech US equipment flows to Vietnam are conditional on Vietnam aligning its own controls with American ones.

Two of those asks are ordinary trade-negotiation material. Non-tariff barriers are the licensing regimes, product standards, registration requirements, and customs practices that raise the cost of selling into Vietnam without appearing in a tariff schedule; they are negotiated in every bilateral agreement and Vietnam has conceded on them before. Intellectual property enforcement is a known file, running through Vietnam's April 30 designation as a Priority Foreign Country in USTR's Special 301 Report and the Section 301 investigation opened on May 29. Vietnam has already responded: the government, in Official Dispatch 38/CĐ-TTg of May 5 (signed by Deputy Prime Minister Hồ Quốc Dũng), launched a May 7–30 enforcement campaign directing ministries to raise copyright-infringement detections by at least 20%, and a further online-piracy push followed this month. That is a country paying an installment.

Export-control alignment is a different category of ask. It requires Vietnam to restrict what it sells, and to whom, in coordination with a country whose principal target is Vietnam's largest trading partner and northern neighbor. Vietnam's two-way trade with China ran $256.5 billion in 2025, and goods imports from China reached $115 billion by the end of June this year. An export-control regime built to American specifications sits directly across that relationship. (That reading is analysis, not a sourced claim. What is sourced is Greer's statement and the trade figures.)

Section 122 expires by operation of law at 12:01 AM Eastern on July 24, three days after this issue lands. The 10% surcharge Vietnamese goods have carried since February 24 stops then regardless of what anyone decides, because the statute caps the authority at 150 days. Trade counsel tracking the handoff expect Section 301 to take over at the 12.5% rate USTR proposed for Vietnam, which trades a temporary surcharge for a permanent one: Section 301 carries no rate cap and no expiry, and its rate can be revised by the same office now asking Hanoi for concessions on three fronts. Issue #5 covered the litigation; we will cover what actually replaced it in next week's Mekong Short Read, once there is a proclamation to read rather than a forecast to repeat.

What I'd tell a client this week: the tariff line on your landed-cost model is now the smaller half of the problem. If your compliance function is built to track duty rates and country-of-origin documentation, it is built for the negotiation that was happening in April. The asks on the table in July are about conduct: enforcement records, licensing regimes, and customer lists. Those sit in a different part of the business than a customs broker's invoice.

Dictate acceptance criteria and reproductions inside Cursor or Warp. Wispr Flow auto-tags file names, preserves syntax, and gives you paste-ready text in seconds. 4x faster than typing.

Try Wispr Flow free

Trade negotiations usually end where they started, on price. This one has drifted somewhere harder to model. When Greer listed Washington's outstanding asks on July 16, none of the three was a tariff rate, and the most consequential of them asked Vietnam to change its posture toward a third country. For anyone sourcing from Vietnam or exporting out of it, the practical question is which of these asks is likely to be met, on what timeline, and what each one does to the cost and legality of a shipment.

First ask: non-tariff barriers

This is the least dramatic and the most likely to be conceded, because Vietnam has already been moving. Decree 252/2026/NĐ-CP, issued June 30 and effective the next day, rewrote the government's tax-administration rules, with Circular 86/2026/TT-BTC carrying the piece that applies to imported and exported goods. Customs Law revision is moving with five groups of proposed amendments. Vietnam Customs has ordered priority and after-hours clearance for agricultural exports at border gates.

None of that was done for Washington. It is domestic administrative reform with its own logic, and it is also the kind of thing that counts as a non-tariff-barrier concession when a negotiator needs to point at something. Expect this ask to be satisfied on paper before the others, and expect the gap between the decree and the provincial customs desk to persist, because it always has.

Second ask: intellectual property

Vietnam is paying this one visibly and fast. The April 30 Priority Foreign Country designation was the first any country had received in 13 years, and USTR opened its Section 301 IP investigation on May 29 with a determination due around late November. Hanoi's response has been a detection-rate target: Official Dispatch 38/CĐ-TTg of May 5, signed by Deputy Prime Minister Hồ Quốc Dũng on the Prime Minister's authority, ordered a 20% increase in copyright-infringement cases and ran an enforcement campaign through the end of that month, followed by a fresh online-piracy push this month explicitly framed against the tariff threat.

Detection targets are a weak instrument for the underlying problem. Vietnam remains a significant host for large English-language piracy operations serving global audiences, and a 20% increase in cases closed does not necessarily touch them. But the ask here is at least addressable by Vietnamese enforcement acting alone, and the November determination date gives Hanoi a visible deadline to perform against.

Third ask: economic security, which means export controls

Greer's third ask is named as economic security cooperation, and when pressed on what that requires he gave one answer: aligning export controls as a condition of US high-tech equipment sales. Treat the two as the same ask, because in this negotiation they are.

That ask rests on a premise about what Vietnam is doing for China. That premise took a serious hit on July 17, when the Federal Reserve published a FEDS note examining Vietnam's export boom to the United States and the role of Chinese firms in it. Its finding: while transshipment through Vietnam has drawn most of the attention, the evidence suggests its quantitative importance is limited. What drove the boom was foreign direct investment and the physical relocation of Chinese production into Vietnam after the 2018-19 tariffs, traceable in Vietnamese firm-level data that identifies the source country of inward FDI.

That distinction carries real money. The 40% transshipment penalty in the framework structure is built for cargo that arrives in Vietnam and leaves relabeled. It is not built for a Chinese-owned factory in Bắc Ninh that employs Vietnamese workers, buys Vietnamese power, performs substantial transformation, and ships a product that is Vietnamese-origin under any conventional rules-of-origin test. The first is fraud. The second is what every China+1 sourcing program in the world has been encouraging since 2019.

Current US practice does not draw that line cleanly, and the enforcement posture is tightening around the ambiguity rather than resolving it. Customs and Border Protection has expanded origin-tracing audits. Commerce opened a circumvention inquiry on July 17 covering solar cells finished in Ethiopia from Chinese parts, including cells then assembled into modules in Vietnam before shipping to the United States. In June, CBP found that Indian manufacturer Waaree Energies had evaded duties by routing solar imports through Vietnam and Malaysia, with anti-dumping duties up to 271.28% assessed. Those are circumvention findings and they are legitimate. The risk for legitimate suppliers is that a rule written to catch relabeling gets applied to ownership.

Competing claims about Chinese capital leaving Vietnam circulated through this fortnight, from a Chinese industry body on one side and US analysts skeptical of the trade deal on the other. Neither is independently verified and both serve their source. The Fed note is the only firm-level evidence in the pile.

What this means for buyers

If you are running a China+1 program through Vietnam, the exposure is not primarily tariff exposure. It is documentary. A Chinese-owned Vietnamese factory is legitimate under current rules of origin and will remain so unless the rules change, but "legitimate" is a claim you have to be able to prove to a CBP auditor working from a tightening posture. Document the production: bills of materials, substantial-transformation evidence, factory-level input sourcing, energy and labor records. Ownership structure is going to attract questions it did not attract in 2024, and the answer to those questions is manufacturing evidence, not a certificate of origin.

What this means for Vietnamese exporters

The export-control ask is the one that would reach into your customer list. A Vietnamese firm handling US-origin high-tech inputs under an aligned control regime would face restrictions on onward sale into China that do not exist today. The IP and non-tariff-barrier asks, by comparison, will produce compliance requirements you'll meet through ordinary channels. Nothing has been agreed. But firms carrying both US-supplier and China-customer exposure should know this is the ask on the table, and the one Hanoi has not yet answered.

Get revenue agents, workflows, and automations across every stage of your motion. Access customer data in real time through Attio's web app, MCP, API, and SDK.

Then Ask Attio anything about your business and get instant answers.

It's the CRM that runs the work behind every win.

Try Attio Now