In an interview with Fox News in April, Peter Navarro, US President Donald Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, described Vietnam as “essentially a colony of communist China”. For someone who believes trade negotiations with Beijing are pointless, such extremist views are unsurprising.Yet the fact that Navarro, the chief architect of Trump’s trade wars, has it in for Vietnam attests to both the vulnerability and the strength of the country’s manufacturing sector. Among the...