Early contacts between the United States and Vietnam began around 1787, when US minister to France Thomas Jefferson met the exiled Vietnamese Prince Cảnh, son of future Gia Long in Paris, as Jefferson
Meeting between President of the United States Joe Biden and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Tô Lâm in 2024, being cited as a significant bilateral meeting between the two leaders.
Letter of Quảng Nam Provincial Commissioner Ngô Bá Hy to Vietnamese emperor Tu Duc (r. 1848-1883) reporting on the arrival of USS Plymouth in Da Nang harbor, sent on March 9, 1850, Vietnamese State Archive. Content by translation: "The president of the Ma-ly-can country said that, four years ago (1845), a naval commander from his country came to our country and allowed his soldiers to go ashore and kill our people, but because his country is so distant, he only learned of it now. He has since punished that naval commander. That commander acted without proper restraint and thus harmed the friendship between the two countries. The president of that country originally did not wish to cling to old grievances and cut off all trade relations... Moreover, fourteen years earlier (1836), they had already sent an envoy named (
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visiting a textile mill in Saigon, 1961
U.S. Army soldiers burning a National Liberation Front base camp during the Vietnam War, 1968
Tô Lâm
Videos
Tô Lâm is a Vietnamese politician and former police officer who since 2024 has served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the highest-ranked position of the Vietnamese politics
United States–Vietnam relations
…atrocities." A senior U.S. diplomat held talks in Vietnam and said that the trust between the two countries was at an all-time high. On 18 January 2026, Tô Lâm accepted the invitation from U.S. President Donald Trump in his capacity of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam to join the United…
Lâm in 2026
Hugo Swire and Tô Lâm in 2012
National Security Advisor John Bolton met then–Police General Tô Lâm at the White House in 2019.
Police General Tô Lâm welcomed US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Hanoi in 2020.