Amid Fears of China, Vietnam's Leader to Visit Obama

The leader of Vietnam will visit with President Barack Obama, a historic moment in the relationship between the two countries that fought a war against each other 40 years ago.

Reuters reports that Obama will meet with Nguyen Phu Trong, the Communist party chief of Vietnam and its most powerful official. The meeting comes as both countries are uneasy about China's positions and actions in regard to the South China Sea, in particular the Spratly Islands, an archipelago of islands, reefs, and rock formations.

Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan all have claims to some of the islands, and have built military and civilian structures on the islands to bolster these claims. In recent months however, China has stepped up its activity in the region, building numerous islands and installing military outposts. One island has a runway large enough to accommodate every plane in the Chinese Air Force.

Vietnam is also constructing its own islands, but its activities are dwarfed by those of its northern neighbor.

China and Vietnam, although both Communist, are not friendly with each other. In the 1970s they fought a brief war, and more recently their coast guards and fisherman butt heads when China placed an oil rig deep within Vietnamese territorial waters to search for oil and gas deposits.

Both nation's civilian navies began ramming each other with their ships, causing some to sink.

The U.S. and Vietnam are not the best of friends either, having only normalized relations in 1995, but a lot of progress on that front has been made. For example, the countries have a trade relationship with each other valued at $35 billion.