 Okay. We're back. We're live. We're here. It's 1 o'clock. Well, it's the 1130 block, I guess you'd say. And I'm Jay Feidell. And I think Tech would talk about Asia in Review. Today we're going to talk about the Trump meeting, the President Trump meeting in Vietnam at the APEC conference, and that's taking place in November of 2017. Now, a special guest for this discussion is a diplomat, a kind of Hawaii special diplomat, okay? And he's the U.S. senior official of APEC Hawaii, a very important person. Russell Hanna, how are you? Thank you. Good morning, Jay. Thank you for inviting me to the show again. And I'm very grateful for coming here. Yeah, great to have you. You give us a dimension we need to have for sure. So I guess the principal point of our discussion this morning is there will be an APEC this year in November in Vietnam. An APEC runs around 21 countries, as I recall, and it has a sort of—has a circuit. And it goes from one to the other, not two in a row. And this year is Vietnam. How is Vietnam selected? Actually, they take terms, as you know, Jay, there's 21 countries, and they're just going to give everybody a fair share. So it's like—so they can showcase their country. We're hosting, as you know, last year it was in Peru, and Peru was hosting the APEC conference. So this year, they passed the torch on to Vietnam, and it's going to be located in Da Nang, Vietnam, which is in the U.S. air base was there. Yeah, actually there was a port too. And strategically, they've been using that port for ever since the Vietnam War, prior to that when the French was occupying Vietnam as a Commonwealth country. So as you know, history—if you look at the history, God, Vietnam in the first—when they first got civilized was in 1620, when they're the Jesuit, the first French men that visit Vietnam, it was a missionary, and he was a Jesuit. And he brought the Christianity, the Christian religion to Vietnam. And that kind of started the whole Vietnam movement with the French was going in there and kind of liberated Vietnam. And this goes on. They must have been there like close to—who knows, about 200 years ever since, maybe close to 250 years. Yeah, I got thrown out in there in the 50s. Actually, if you look at the history, J, when Vietnam was being independent, if you go back when 1941, prior to that, when Japan was going through the Sina War, and Japan took over Vietnam from 1941 to 1945, and what happened was, after the war, there was a famous general, Ho Chi Minh. We know him. And he's the one that liberated Vietnam to become independent and being a sovereign country. So as you know, after the war of World War II, Ho Chi Minh wanted to become—he thought it was a big chance now to be liberated and get away from France. And the French start coming back again, since it wasn't occupied under Japan during the World War II. And this was in like 1945 and 1946. And they were brutal. And they went up to the north side, up in north Vietnam. And they're kind of being—and the Russians were kind of aiding them as well, and given their military equipment, and they were kind of helping them out as well. Helping Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh. And if you look at it, then—and what happened was, then the United States was teaming up with France, because France was kind of leaving Indo—French-Indo-China, which was—they had a lot of influence with Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and Thailand. And they were an ally in the war, so they were closer to them because of that. Yes, exactly. And hopefully, when they found that Ho Chi Minh wanted to become independent sovereign nation, he fought the French, and they beat him. The NBN Fu, the famous battle that routed the French out of Vietnam. Exactly. And at the time, I guess the French wanted to leave the Indo—the French into the Niger area, because they wanted to go to Africa, they wanted to go to the Middle East with the foreign legions, and they were trying to—they wanted to get out of Asia. So what happens, the United States—they're asking United States to carry on. And Ho Chi Minh himself wanted to team up with the United States and become partners. But what happened was the United States went with the French. So Ho Chi Minh decided to go with the Chinese and with Mao Tung's tongue at the timing. And as you know, Ho Chi Minh was very educated. He was trained under the Russians as well, was educated in Russia, learning the Communist Party with Leningrad, and when Joseph Stalin was in power. So he was learning a lot about the Communist Party. So he became one of the leaders between Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. So after the war of 1940, when Ho Chi Minh took over and beat the French, and they became South, the East— Was that in, what, 49 or 50, something like that? Right. It was like—because the Vietnam War for the United States, when we got involved with the 1955, and, you know, we're working with the South Vietnam, and the South Vietnam—so North was sending them some of the Chinese, Vietnamese, they call them Viet Cong. So we're fighting the Viet Cong in the South Vietnam, and that kind of—it's a little confusing, but, you know, in terms of history, but it's kind of a similar format, what happened with between the— Violence wasn't confusing. There were plenty of violence in those states. Exactly. Like, what we've seen within the North Korea and South Korea. Good thing that then happened, like, you know, they didn't bring the border. And I think it was a 17th parallel between North and South Korea, that they had a boundary. But they became it with the Peace Treaty. I think what happened was in 1973, after we got overthrown, we signed an agreement with the Paris Agreement in Paris, and they wanted to liberate Vietnam to become independent, a sovereign nation. And the U.S. Congress took up about this Case Church Amendment, this agreement that's saying that we're not going to—we're going to pull out of Vietnam and not have a war with them, as well with Cambodian Laos. So every time we're going to go into war with the Vietnam or Cambodian Laos, it has to go through the Congress for approval. So then, in 1975 came, that's when the war of Vietnam was over. And hopefully, U.S. pulled out, and we had so many immigration immigrants coming to the United States. I would say right now, we have about one point—close to two million immigrants that came because of the Vietnam War that's living as Vietnamese Americans that live in the United States. In Hawaii, we have roughly close to about 18,000 or 20,000 Vietnamese Americans living in Hawaii. So we have a big community here. And if you look at this present day, they have a Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce here that's bridging the gap with Vietnam and the United States. They're law-abiding citizens. They're well-educated. So, you know, and they're part of the ethnic chamber here, and we have an ethnic chamber in Hawaii with a Vietnamese Chamber, a Australian Chamber, as well as a Chinese Chamber. So talk about the economics in Vietnam, because APEC is primarily directed at—it's the Asia-Pacific Economic Council, no? APEC? Yeah. APEC is—we have APEC summit coming in November, and it involves 21 countries. And Vietnam is a member of the— They've been successful. Yeah. Their economy is good. It's still a communist country, but it's a moderate communist country, and it's a certain amount of capital investment going on. Yeah. If you look at the growth within the past 30 years that Vietnam's been having, they've been growing like close to 6% to 8% early, and we project that according to economists that specialize in Vietnam, the data shows that they're going to be growing another 6% to 8% 10 years from now. That's pretty good. So they're having a robustity of their economy. A lot—you know, they're having more growth in China. And if you look at their commodities and manufacturing, a lot of the labor in China are getting too expensive. So they're all moving into Vietnam for like apparel or clothing or textile. It's outsourcing to Vietnam. Exactly. Our clothes, our rubber manufacturing, a lot of stuff we're kind of going to Vietnam. Like before, it was Indonesia or India. Like if you look at your clothes and our trademark, country of origin, a lot of them are stitched in manufactured, steam-trips kind of work is done in Vietnam. And you look at our perils, like our clothing, our shirts that we wear, that what we buy at the department stores and stuff that none of them are made in Vietnam. So you see that a lot of manufacturing are done in Vietnam now for tangible goods that we consume here. What about Hawaii's economic connection with Vietnam? I can tell you, I had a client once who owned some property in Hawaii. He was actually from another Pacific area, and he came to Hawaii and invested in it. One day he told me, he said, you know, Hawaii's nice, but Vietnam is where you can make some money. Took all his investment into Vietnam, made a lot of money in Vietnam. How about that? Yeah, I think that—and you know what came out of it, Jay, was because in 2013 we signed a Vietnam comprehensive agreement when Barack Obama was the president, and he, a manufacturer, visited there in 2016 to kind of follow up on that comprehensive agreement. Ever since that, if you look at the 20 years that, you know, in the protocol and diplomacy that we had with the State Department, in 1995 we officially opened a U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and was able to send an ambassador there. And vice versa, Vietnam was able to open an embassy in Washington. Prior to that, it was like a consulate with San Francisco, Vietnam had a consulate in San Francisco. Yeah, that was a cold shoulder. We were giving them the cold shoulder for a long time, so it's all very positive what happened and good for us that we ameliorated what was a cold shoulder after the war. But so, you know, that the Scheidler College of Business has a regular—it has a facility in Ho Chi Minh City. It teaches businessmen and women in Vietnam how to do business. It is responsible for a number of the education of a number of CEOs who are effectively running the country. So we have a good business relationship with Vietnam. They like us. We like them. It's a mutual engagement. And so, you know, it's interesting, what happens is you have a war and then in the aftermath of the war you get closer, closer than you might have been otherwise. We had to spend some lives, like 50,000 lives in that war, but at the moment, you know, we have a, as you said, a robust relationship with Vietnam. Yeah, exactly. Jay, if you look at the history, the Romans will call it Pax Romana, which means peace after war. And what happens is that we go there and we kind of get into war. We kind of mess up their country. So we want to rebuild the country after we're bringing peace and prosperity. And Romans used to do that when they used to conquer their Eastern and Western Europe. And they used to build the Great Wall, or the Road of Haters' Road, you know. So in those kind of aspects, you know, it's not a good way of saying Pax Romana, but I think historically, you know, that's the approach that civilized nations take, you know, developed countries that have been empowered. And it's an advantage that we have. We might as well take advantage of that advantage. It's an opportunity to build a long-term relationship with them. You know, on all of this, Obama went there for APEC, right? Or he went, yeah, he went to Vietnam. What did he do there? Actually, he went there just to follow up on when he was— It was not for APEC. It was just for diplomatic media, I guess. Yeah, there was a diplomatic relation. And I think he wanted a few presidents that actually visit there to break the ice after the— Yeah. Good for him. I haven't been in a diplomatic channel for a while, because ever since 1995, when we signed that agreement for the Comprehensive Agreement in 2003, we didn't have a—we had a 20-years of relationship now. Yeah, that's fabulous. Yeah. So, you know, here we are sort of on the cusp of what could be a long-term connection with a strategically important place, economically and geopolitically, in Asia. And it's coming up in November, and the word is that Trump is going to go. And right after this break, I want to talk about that and the implications, why he's going to go, what he could achieve, and the likelihood of success of some sort in connection with that trip. That's Russell Hanra. He's a U.S. senior official for APEC in Hawaii. We're talking about the Trump meeting in Vietnam. We've set the stage. We'll be right back after this break, and we'll drill down. We'll be right back. Aloha. My name is Stephen Philip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii, where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at three o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Okay, we're back. Well, I'm Jay Fidale here on Think Tech, and we're doing Asia in Review talking about the Trump meeting, which is coming up later this year in Vietnam, the APEC meeting in Vietnam. And our special guest is Russell Hanra. He's the U.S. senior official for APEC in Hawaii. And are you going to go, Russell? Are you going to go there for that meeting? Yes? Yeah, hopefully, if they send me the right credentials. And a matter of fact, I've sent my resume to Donald Trump and Trump administration as well. So I know that he's still going to fulfill a lot of his cabinet position, opponent position with the State Department. And we just got our United States Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer. And I'm sure he's looking for a lot of good staff to work under him as well. So we'll see how his appointments go. Yeah. I hope they go, because he hasn't appointed a lot of people. And we need to have a strong, experienced Acomai State Department and officials like your own self out there building relationships with all these countries or maintaining them. And he has a way of making statements that don't help sometimes, as we know from his Twitter tweets. But let's talk about, you know, what he could achieve. Let's say he did the right thing to go. First of all, it's a good idea to go, don't you think? The American president should go to APEC in Vietnam. You know, we want to have a certain relationship with them. We should have a presence there, don't you think? Yeah. I think so. He already made an official statement. That he was going? Through the State Department, through his White House spokesperson, or said that he is going to attend, because eventually, at the time, there's going to be East Asia Summit as well in Ho Chi Minh City. In that part in Vietnam. So usually when the APEC conference happens, there's another East Asia Summit with the ASEAN countries. So it kind of, so they don't waste their time. The leaders can get together and discuss a lot of, have a dialogue about the issues that they're involved with and when they're strategically they can reposition themselves. So I think in our case, you know, Donald, President Donald Trump knows that the relationship with Vietnam, and as you know, our generation, we're the post-war generation of Vietnam who are running the country right now, so in that generation, we want to bring peace to Vietnam and close the chapter because we were involved in a war that shouldn't have been there. A bad time for everyone. Exactly. But you know, the funny thing is that you go through the history and I really appreciate you doing that, of Vietnam and how Vietnam fits with the rest of Southeast Asia, how it fits with the United States, its history, with Europe, with France. A lot of people don't know, they forget, the other generation and even the generation running things may not know exactly what happened and how those 50,000 American troops died and how sore it is and how we have to, we have to, oh, po-no-po-no, you know, fix it up. And maybe this is an opportunity to do that. What doesn't ring true for me is that he's an isolationist. He's breaking the, you know, the ties with people all over the world, making statements that are alienating people. He's not very good at diplomatic relations or diplomatic conduct. So although you've got to give him credit for deciding to go, you wonder how he'll be able to handle it. I mean, if you were Donald Trump, how would you handle it in November? Actually, for Donald Trump, or the president, he already met the prime minister from Vietnam, Nguyen Phuc. He just, they met about two weeks ago in Washington. He came by and just to show that good gesture that they want to keep working together in terms of maybe... Here's a picture of that meeting, yeah. And I think the relationship, and I know that presidents did say that it's, you know, it's very important. It's vital that we have a good relationship with Vietnam and we have a good Vietnamese American community in the United States, as well in Hawaii, who want to strengthen the relationship. And as you know, Vietnam is changing right now from communist regime to socialist democratic reform. So we know that Vietnam is going to play that major role. And they're shying away from China. And so they want to work with the United States. They prefer the United States to China? Yes. Why is that from their point of view? I think they learned throughout history what went through. And they know that being more democracy, being more open and working within the international community, it's going to benefit them as well. And even with tourism, ever since the 2013 comprehensive agreement that we signed with Vietnam, tourism increased. We have more direct flight with Vietnam Airlines. Roughly we have about 80,000 visitors coming early from Vietnam. And out of that, I would say 19,000 are students who are studying, going to school in the United States. So we're glooming a lot of these young leaders that's coming out from Vietnam. That's great. Yeah, I think that's a good thing. They're connected with us by virtue of the fact that there are almost two million Vietnamese in the country, most of whom are valuable players in the country. They go to school, they learn, they participate in the economy and all that. But the question I put to you is, what can Trump achieve to make a special trip here, to make this trip special? I think Trump's got to show not only showing that he's interested in Vietnam, he's got to show that his interest in Asia-Pacific region and bringing peace to the region and prosperity there and what United States can play as a major role. I know that we're pushing in terms of trade and commerce that we're focusing more on the bilateral trade agreement with Vietnam. As you know, the United States was a member with TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership. And Vietnam is a member of TPP. So it's a problem, isn't it? But they realize that they want to work with the United States. Anyway, on a bilateral basis. On a bilateral basis, and see if—and as you know, right now, TPP, they had a meeting in Vietnam with the trade ministers, and they discussed that on the sidelines with the trade ministers, saying that Japan, Australia and New Zealand is going to proceed with the TPP. And hopefully, they're going to persuade all the other 11 members who are signatory members. And hopefully, they can wish that maybe United States will eventually join in again, go back to TPP. So we have an option there. Yeah, it's an option, but it's not likely in this administration. And it's likely, I think, in the next administration, especially if there's a reaction vote against Trump. But it seems to me that when you threaten to pull out of NATO, when you do pull out of TPP, when you reject the Paris Accord, you're isolating this country. You're cutting ties that we spent years and years of diplomatic effort to create in the first place. Very hard to get back where it used to be. We lose franchise. We lose respect in the global community. And what's worse is these organizations go on, hopefully—I mean, I hope they do—without us. It may hurt them that we leave. It may hurt NATO. It may hurt TPP. It may hurt various organizations that he's backing out of. But the reality is that they will continue without us, don't you think? And that's what will happen with TPP, won't it? Yeah, I think in terms of—we might lose our credibility and our trust with our international partners and our allies. But I think they're intelligent enough to know the leadership role. And they know that Donald Trump is playing that different kind of leadership role. So I know the leaders are kind of trying to have a relationship with our president. Yeah, well, I wanted to ask you about it, because this is a very interesting picture, and it's an interesting phenomenon that he met with the leader of Vietnam right a couple weeks ago. But what do the Vietnamese think about? What do they think about us today? What do they think about having economic relations with us? What do they think about having mutual security with us? And what do they think about Trump? That's the big question. Are they going to really do business, or are they just biding their time for another president? I think in terms of—you get to understand the dynamics of the private sector and the public sector. In terms of public sector to government, and we have our government official, we have our protocol, we have our embassy. We have all these think tank agencies that's working around that. And then you have our private sector that's doing business, our U.S. Chamber of Commerce, top 500 blue-chip companies that's doing business. And we're going to continue on. I don't think in terms of private business, in terms of trade or import, export, Vietnam is a specialized general systems preference country, so they don't pay tariffs or anything. And now they got out of that, and now we're trying to come up with the U.S.-Vietnam trade agreement, besides having that comprehensive agreement in 2013. So I think when they meet on the sidelines at the APEC conference in November, our President, Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson, our Secretary of State, and our United States Trade Representative, Robert Leidenhauser, can work with their counterpart, with their leaders, and maybe come up with a better deal, or in terms of our bilateral trade agreement. So, I mean, could it be legitimately argued that the U.S. is better off with a bilateral agreement than being part of TPP? Well, if you look at the difference to my experience, bilateral, you know, United States as a whole, we're a big country. You know, I would say 80 percent, 85 percent are domestic demand. You know, maybe 15 or 20 percent might be export-oriented in terms of cost of good sold in terms of generating revenues for those industries. But if you look at the multilateral, like coming with different countries, maybe we can do our joint ventures, make it a high-caliber kind of trade agreements that, in terms of pharmaceutical, painter, licensing fees, or intellectual property rights, unless we know which countries are. This would be in a bilateral trade agreement? Yeah, in terms of bilateral, we do have those terms, but if you have those like TPP, which is a multilateral, it involves so many different countries, and they have to have the same standards. Yeah, so maybe it's easier to do a bilateral, because there's only two countries involved. Yeah, that's our traditional way we've been doing our trade agreements, it's been bilateral. Yeah. And so, you know, if you look at our competitive edge and looking at the whole business structure of import, export, international trade agreements, bilateral will supersede, supersede. And I put that on my APEC Master Plan, dude. I did mention about having each country precipitate in the TPP, but first we should do the bilateral agreement to make sure there's no misunderstanding or terms and conditions are solid, and then we can proceed with the multilateral. Right, and maybe a different range of issues in the multilateral, yeah. One thing that just strikes me, we're almost out of time here, but one thing that just strikes me is that some countries may resent the fact that we do bilateral agreements with other members of TPP and not with them. Some countries may be jealous or competitive and feel that the U.S. is favoring, say in this case, Vietnam, and not favoring, say, Laos, say, Myanmar, say, Thailand. Does that happen? Is there sort of a competition and a resentment? I think there's so, you know, I'm sure each country has their favoritism. If you look at China, for example, they're pushing the RCEP, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with the ASEAN countries. So they might have a competitive edge over the ASEAN countries, because they have a lot of Chinese descendants living there as a one China policy, and they're pushing for that one road initiative with the BRICS countries and with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that they're pushing for. So, you know, those kind of things, they might be having that certain favoritism as well. And we have ours with our allies and our partners, and TPP was one of them. Also, one minute left. Okay. Can you address the people and tell the people what they should be thinking about APEC, what they should be thinking about Trump's visit to Vietnam in November? Well, you know, I just wanted to highlight this. It's vital for us, the United States, to work with Vietnam, not because of the history of the Vietnam War, but in terms of region, we want to help countries who wants to open up, be part of the international community. As you know, Vietnam, the people over there are caring people, they're loving caring, and they're into human rights right now. And they want to do good, because, you know, the ugliness they went through with the war and how they've been reviving and putting their effort. And as you know, all the other neighboring countries want to make sure that all the Asian countries are going to be working together. And I think Vietnam plays that role. Yeah, that's great. And you know, I hope that the President sees it the same way, and that he actually advances our interest and relationship in November. We'll be watching him, and you'll be watching him. Russell Hanme, U.S. senior official for APEC in Hawaii. Thank you so much, Russell. Thank you, Jay. For coming down. Yeah, by the law.