Hynek Kmoníček: In Relations with Vietnam, We Are Living on the Emotional Credit of the Past
In June 2026, under the auspices of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPS), a panel discussion entitled “The Czech Republic and Vietnam: Past, Present, and Future” was held at CEVRO University. Among its guests was Hynek Kmoníček, the former Czech Ambassador to Vietnam. In the following interview, conducted by our analysts Kateřina Kovács and Daniela Finkousová, you can read about the relations between the two countries, the challenges they face, and the nature of diplomatic service in Southeast Asia.
During your career, you served in Washington and later in Hanoi. How would you say these years in the diplomatic service changed you as a person?
Substantially, because one of the few lifelong advantages of a diplomatic career is that it does not allow you to grow old. Every ordinary person grows older and gradually develops routines; there are many things in life they would no longer want to change because it is painful and demanding. Diplomacy guarantees that you will continue living as if you were still 30 years old. That means that wherever you are stationed, you are always waiting for a phone call informing you that in a week's time you will be in another country, on another continent, starting all over again from scratch. Diplomacy gives you a great deal, takes away a great deal, and most importantly, it never allows you to become stuck in the routine of old age.
If you were to compare diplomatic life in Washington and Hanoi, what are the biggest differences in terms of informal conversations behind the scenes and the way trust is built?
They are completely incomparable because they stem from entirely different positions of the Czech Republic, which you represent there. In the United States, our primary task is to prove that we exist. Half of your time in Washington is spent convincing people that your country actually exists and that it can even be interesting and important to them. In Vietnam, you do not have that problem. You can simply stand in a corner, and the first thousand Vietnamese people will come to you. The expectations are completely different, life is different, and even the benefits you gain from it are different. Whereas in the United States, the fundamental issue is security, in Vietnam, it is the economy. In Washington, your job is to ensure that if someone were ever to accidentally want to occupy us again, we could make a phone call, someone would answer it, and they would have a reason to do so. In Vietnam, your role is to maintain our partnership and learn how to monetize it so that it is sufficiently beneficial for both sides.
The Czech Republic and Vietnam share a long history dating back to the period before the Velvet Revolution. How has this partnership evolved today, and in what ways are we strategically most important to one another in 2026?
Today, we are strategic partners, which is both remarkable and somewhat bizarre because we reached the stage of a strategic partnership with communist Vietnam at a time when we are part of NATO. Back in 1970, no one on either side would have believed that. This partnership is like a relationship after 70 years. You already know what you can expect from the other party and what you cannot.
Which specific areas do you believe have the greatest potential for further developing the strategic partnership between the Czech Republic and Vietnam over the next 10 years?
Over the next 10 years, we should diversify Czech exports to Vietnam so that they are not always concentrated in a single commodity. Today, our new dominant export commodity is largely weapons, which have replaced the automotive industry and currently account for a substantial share of our exports to Vietnam. However, we also have a long tradition of exporting machinery and consumer goods. That is why we made a successful effort to conclude a seven year struggle to allow the export of Czech salamis and meat products to Vietnam, which was by no means automatic or easy. Everyone used to smuggle salamis into Vietnam so that we would not have to eat the terrible sweet local ones. That was a gap in the market that we are now gradually managing to fill, and there are dozens of similar opportunities.
On the Vietnamese side, exports largely consist of products manufactured in Vietnam by major foreign investors. If we look at the volume and types of electronics imported to the Czech Republic, a significant share comes from South Korean Samsung products manufactured more cheaply in Vietnam. If we look at footwear imports, they are usually produced by Taiwanese manufacturers making a wide range of global brands, again in Vietnam. The Vietnamese side will also seek to make these products more genuinely Vietnamese, which creates further opportunities for us to export technologies. We are happy to export such technologies to countries where we are able to oversee their use, because we hold a sufficiently strong and advantageous position there.
Based on your experience, in which sectors do Czech companies have the greatest chance of succeeding in Vietnam, and what makes them more attractive than their foreign competitors?
Arms manufacturers, which I have already mentioned, have a strong chance of succeeding because they offer competitive prices. Moreover, Vietnam knows us well, so it understands that it does not risk becoming an object of our strategic interests. To be honest, we have no strategic interest in Vietnam itself. What interests us is its economy, the dollars, and how much of that can be brought back here. The same cannot be said of Russian or American suppliers, and it is certainly not the case with French suppliers given the historical burden of colonialism. Politically, we are neutral friends. The Vietnamese have adopted the view that, despite the end of socialism, nothing really changed in our country. We are still the same comrades, only wealthier. From the perspective of the Vietnamese communist leadership, they no longer concern themselves with our capitalism or our political orientation, and we do not challenge that perception.
However, we should make much greater use of the substantial investments already made in Vietnam by Czech Vietnamese entrepreneurs. We have not yet properly developed or utilized them. We should work with them more actively and encourage Czech investors to join them. I believe that, apart from the automotive industry, which is already established there, our greatest opportunity in the future will most likely be in the energy sector.
Vietnam is considered a master of so called bamboo diplomacy. It skillfully balances its relationships with different powers. From the perspective of the Czech security strategy, which is firmly anchored in the West, does Vietnam's partnership with Moscow and Beijing sometimes pose a risk?
It certainly can pose a risk, which is why we must be very careful about what we export, under what conditions, and what further transfers might be possible, including various dual use technologies. On the other hand, Vietnam has a rather unique relationship with China. China is both its greatest friend and, historically, its greatest enemy. Vietnam's relations with Russia have been motivated primarily by the fact that Russia served as a counterbalance to China. Now that Russia and China are closely aligned, I no longer see either a significant rapprochement or increasing motivation on the Vietnamese side. Today, Vietnam is placing much greater emphasis on its relationship with the United States. The situation changes dramatically every year.
Vietnam is becoming a key player in Southeast Asia and is also attracting global investors. How do you perceive its current geopolitical role, and how does the interest of the Czech Republic, and the European Union as a whole, fit into it?
At the moment, Vietnam is growing by 5 to 7 percent every year. No country in the European Union can achieve that. Their plan, which they are likely to accomplish, is to maintain double digit annual growth over the next 20 years. Vietnam is benefiting greatly from China's current difficulties. China is running out of Chinese people. That is not happening in Vietnam. Every year, another one million Vietnamese are born, and according to demographers, this population growth will continue at least until 2035. This generally suits us because we have no interest in China becoming the world's largest market or the only dominant manufacturer of everything. This dominance can be reduced by supporting the other emerging Asian economies, including Vietnam.
The European Union has concluded a Free Trade Agreement with Vietnam. How does this instrument help Czech businesses in practice, and where might they still encounter hidden obstacles?
In practice, it has helped by putting the Vietnamese market on the map for Czech businesses. However, I believe we are only beginning to learn how to make proper use of this instrument because everything has its own Vietnamese specifics. The fact that an agreement has been signed does not necessarily mean that it is fully implemented. It simply means that it provides a framework within which the issues covered by the agreement can be negotiated. We believe in full liberalization, and we believe we can convince both our own businesses and Vietnamese businesses that it is in their mutual interest. As a result, they should stop creating unnecessary obstacles, often bureaucratic ones on our side and commercial ones on the Vietnamese side. We need to be just as smart as our Vietnamese friends.
What do you see as the greatest opportunities and, at the same time, the greatest challenges for Czech-Vietnamese relations in the coming years?
I see so many opportunities that we could spend an entire hour simply listing them sector by sector. The challenge, however, is that on the Vietnamese side, the current aging community of around 300,000 people who speak Czech and have an emotional connection to the Czech people will gradually disappear. To be honest, we are doing almost nothing to maintain or develop this relationship. Let me give you an example. As the Czech Ambassador to Vietnam, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would allocate about 5,000 dollars per year for the promotion of Czech culture. Even by Vietnamese standards, that is not enough to cover the cost of a respectable official reception. I understand that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs lacks funding. It has the smallest budget of all Czech ministries. However, because this has been the case for such a long time, the community and its emotional ties to the Czech Republic are gradually eroding.
We are still one of the ten most important embassies in Hanoi, but that is due more to the size of the Vietnamese community living in the Czech Republic than to what we are currently able to offer Vietnam in an increasingly competitive environment. In the past, Vietnam used to send students to the Czech Republic. Last year, we had only 110 postgraduate students, most of whom were self funded. Government scholarships provided by the Czech Republic are essentially nonexistent. By comparison, in the same year, nearly 70,000 Vietnamese students went to the United States on Vietnamese and American scholarships, and Vietnamese has already become the third most widely spoken language in Texas. That is a completely different situation, and it is clear where the future is heading.
The greatest challenge is to maintain the close Czech-Vietnamese relationship. Today, this relationship is sustained not because we actively nurture it or invest even minimal financial resources into it, but simply because we have such a large and influential Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic that continues to maintain family and emotional ties with Vietnam. In essence, we are living off past investments and on the emotional credit of the past.
If you were to summarize it and define one main goal or personal vision that you would like to see fulfilled in Czech-Vietnamese trade or strategic relations, what would it be?
I would like to teach my fellow Czech citizens to view the Vietnamese realistically, appreciating both their strengths and their weaknesses, and to recognize how much they have had to contribute in order to become part of our society. On the Vietnamese side, I would like them to understand one day that reducing the bureaucratic burden involved in selling a single shipping container, which typically contains around 70 different commodities, from an average of five and a half metres of paperwork to one and a half metres is not real progress.
Bc. Daniela Finkousová, MPA and Bc. Kateřina Kovács