There is a particular brand of desperation that smells of fresh asphalt, cheap electronics, and the panicked sweat of a Davos attendee who has just realized their portfolio is over-leveraged in a single time zone. This scent is currently emanating from the Southeast Asian corridor, where Vietnam has been positioned as the latest 'economic miracle' for a Western world that desperately needs to believe in miracles to avoid looking at its own balance sheets. We are told, with the breathless enthusiasm usually reserved for a new iPhone launch, that Vietnam’s growth is fast. It is, in fact, blistering. But as any surgeon—or cynic—will tell you, a high fever also indicates rapid metabolic activity right before the patient succumbs to the underlying rot. The tragedy of the Vietnamese model is not that it is failing, but that it is succeeding by mimicking the exact same systemic flaws that make its neighbors so perpetually brittle.

The core of the issue, according to those brave souls still capable of basic arithmetic, is that this entire 'miracle' is precariously balanced upon a handful of conglomerates. These are the national champions, the state-adjacent behemoths that have their fingers in everything from luxury real estate to electric scooters that nobody asked for. It is a vertical integration of risk that would make a Lehman Brothers executive blush. In the West, we have monopolies that are 'too big to fail'; in Vietnam, they have created an entire ecosystem where the failure of a single billionaire’s real estate venture could theoretically plunge the national GDP into a localized dark age. It is less an economy and more a high-stakes game of Jenga played with architectural glass and the hubris of the nouveau riche. The reliance on these conglomerates is the ultimate triumph of bureaucratic laziness. It is far easier for a government to hand the keys of the kingdom to five men in well-tailored suits than it is to foster a genuinely diverse, bottom-up market that might—god forbid—demand something as inconvenient as the rule of law or transparent competition.

The Western corporate class, in their infinite wisdom, has dubbed this the 'China Plus One' strategy. It is a charmingly clinical term for fleeing one authoritarian factory floor just to set up shop in another one that is slightly cheaper and hasn't yet started building its own aircraft carriers. Companies like Apple and Samsung have flocked to Vietnam, treating the nation as a convenient backup drive for their global supply chains. They seem blissfully indifferent to the fact that the underlying infrastructure is held together by the aforementioned conglomerates, whose interests are as opaque as a Hanoi smog. They are trading one form of state-controlled volatility for another, more fragile variety, all while patting themselves on the back for their 'diversification.' It is the geopolitical equivalent of moving your money from a bank that is on fire to a bank that is built entirely out of dry kindling and optimism.

One must also admire the linguistic gymnastics required to maintain the facade of 'Market Socialism.' It is a term that suggests a harmonious blend of Marx and Milton Friedman, but in practice, it is simply a theater of the absurd where the state directs the capital, the capital bribes the state, and the common worker is told that their increasing cost of living is a sign of progress. This growth, while impressive on a spreadsheet, is fundamentally hollow. It is growth derived from assembly lines and property speculation, rather than innovation or domestic resilience. When the global demand for plastic widgets inevitably cools, or when the debt-fueled property bubbles of these mega-conglomerates finally pop, there will be no safety net. There will only be the bewildered silence of investors who thought they had found a shortcut to eternal profit.

The fragility of Vietnam is not a bug in the system; it is the system itself. By concentrating power and wealth in a few favored hands, the nation has achieved a rapid ascent at the cost of its structural integrity. It is the classic Icarus trajectory, performed with a socialist-realist aesthetic. We are watching a nation sprint toward a precipice, cheered on by an international community that is too bored to notice the cracks in the ground. I suppose we should enjoy the spectacle while it lasts; the crash, when it inevitably arrives, will at least provide some much-needed data for the next generation of analysts to ignore as they search for the next 'miracle' in a slightly different geographic coordinate. After all, the theater of the absurd never truly closes; it just changes its lead actors and moves to a cheaper venue.