Michael Baumgartner visits Vietnam, Singapore amid U.S.-China competition for influence in Asia

WASHINGTON - With Congress out of session for the week of Memorial Day, Rep. Michael Baumgartner traveled to Vietnam and Singapore at a time when the United States and China are competing for influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

A first-term Republican from Spokane who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Baumgartner traveled with the panel's top Democratic member, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, to meet with Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi. The two men then joined Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia's premier national-security conference.

In an interview this week, Baumgartner said the trip was an important opportunity to build on his travel to the Middle East, China and the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

"What happens around the world has a real impact on the people that I work for," he said, "so in my role on foreign affairs, it's important that I get out and represent Eastern Washington's interests and also get a better understanding of what's going on around the world."

Vietnam is Washington state's seventh-largest trading partner, Baumgartner said, but despite buying apples, cherries and wheat from Washington farmers, the country exports far more to U.S. customers than it imports from the United States. That's partly due to tariffs the Vietnamese government levies on U.S. goods - the congressman cited the example of a 55% tariff on American wine compared to just a 5% import tax on European wine.

"The Trump administration is making a real push that the Vietnamese need to bring down their tariff rates," he said. "There's a perception that the Trump administration has just raised tariffs, but in this instance, they have raised tariffs with the goal of reducing some Vietnamese tariffs."

With a fast-growing population of more than 100 million, Vietnam will be an important export market not only for Washington produce but also things like military hardware, Baumgartner said. The U.S. government is "on the cusp" of approving the sale of Lockheed C-130 transport planes in what would be the first foreign military sale to Vietnam, he said, and reducing Vietnam's reliance on Russian and Chinese defense purchases would benefit the U.S. government's strategic goals and the American companies that need to sell military equipment to other countries.

In Singapore, much of the attention was on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who emphasized the Trump administration's desire for U.S. allies in Asia to pull their own weight by spending more on defense. In a departure from a speech at the same event a year earlier, when Hegseth warned that "any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan by force would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world," the Pentagon chief didn't mention Taiwan in his speech on May 29.

After Trump delayed a planned arms sale to Taiwan ahead of his May 13-15 visit to China, that change of rhetoric drew concerns that U.S. policy toward Taiwan may change as part of a deal with Beijing. China's government seeks to reunify with Taiwan, an island country to which the former Chinese ruling party fled in 1949 after losing the country's civil war. The United States has long maintained a policy of "strategic ambiguity" in which it neither supports nor opposes Taiwanese independence.

Baumgartner said Hegseth's pledge to "defend the status quo" in his remarks in Singapore should be understood as a continuation of that policy.

"I think it is important that we continue current U.S. policy towards Taiwan, which is to maintain the status quo," Baumgartner said, adding that the U.S. government should "continue to support arms sales to Taiwan to ensure that force is not used to change the status quo."

In Vietnam and Singapore, Baumgartner said, he consistently heard from foreign officials that they want the United States and China to talk, not to fight. He invoked the Swahili proverb famously used by Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's first president, to describe the Cold War's effect on less powerful nations: "When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled."

Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.

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This story was originally published June 4, 2026 at 7:14 PM.