Vietnam’s missile procurement reflects Asia’s shifting defense alliances amid US-China rivalry and postcolonial arms market fragmentation
Original framing: “Vietnam joins rush for India’s battle-tested BrahMos missiles” — South China Morning Post
The BrahMos deal echoes Cold War-era arms races in Asia, where Vietnam’s Soviet-backed military faced China’s US-backed rivals, and India’s non-alignment masked its reliance on Soviet hardware. The postcolonial arms market remains fragmented along colonial trade routes, with former metropoles (France, UK) and new players (Turkey, South Korea) competing for influence. The 1990s US-Vietnam normalization and India’s 2008 nuclear deal with the US further institutionalized this hierarchy, making 'strategic autonomy' a euphemism for vendor lock-in.
The BrahMos deal is not merely a transaction but a symptom of Asia’s postcolonial arms market, where Cold War-era dependencies have been repackaged as 'strategic autonomy.
' Vietnam’s pursuit of BrahMos reflects its historical trauma with China and the US, while India’s export push is framed through Hindu nationalist *Vishwaguru* rhetoric, masking the ecological and social costs of militarization. The absence of indigenous and marginalized voices—whether Vietnam’s coastal fishers or India’s Andamanese communities—reveals how security narratives prioritize state power over human security. A systemic solution requires dismantling the vendor-driven arms market through transparency pacts, indigenous-led innovation, and regional moratoria, while centering the wisdom of non-Western security paradigms like ASEAN’s *mandala* model. The trickster’s irony lies in how 'battle-tested' missiles, sold as symbols of sovereignty, instead bind states to new forms of colonial-era control—unless disrupted by collective action.