HANOI, Vietnam — A visit to Vietnam this week by Robert M. Gates, the United States defense secretary, is just the latest step in a bilateral relationship that is at its warmest since diplomatic ties were established 15 years ago.
A steady progression of careful gestures has eroded the enmities of the Vietnam War, built a basis of increasing trust and turned the two nations’ attention, in large part, from issues of the past to the present.
It is the second American cabinet-level visit to Vietnam in four months; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came in July. Exchanges at this level have become almost common, if not routine.
Mr. Gates was here for a gathering of defense chiefs from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations and partner countries.
“I would say that relations are at their highest point in 15 years,” said Hung M. Nguyen, director of the Indochina Institute at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “We have basically removed the major hurdles of suspicion in military-to-military relations, and I would expect things to proceed quite fast,” he said.
The main concern shared by the two nations underscores the shifts in alliances in the 35 years since the war came to an end: Chinese claims in the South China Sea.
It is an issue with some historical paradox. While the United States sought during the war to contain an expansion of Chinese Communism into Vietnam, it is aligned with Vietnam today in concern over an escalation of China’s maritime claims.
China was an ally of North Vietnam in its war against South Vietnam and the United States in the 1960s and ’70s and is now a partner of a unified Vietnam in an uneasy relationship between Communist nations of vastly different size.
“Vietnam worries about Chinese in the South China Sea, and America worries about interference in freedom of navigation,” Dr. Hung said. “Because of this, the strategic interests of Vietnam and the United States converge.”
On Tuesday, Vietnam announced that China had released a Vietnamese fishing boat and crew it had seized near the disputed Paracel Islands a month ago, ending the latest flare-up between the nations. China earlier said that the crew must pay a fine, and Vietnam said that the crew members had been mistreated.
By Vietnam’s count, 63 fishing boats with 725 crew members have been seized since 2005 in areas claimed by China.
In March, China raised the level of its territorial claim, asserting that the South China Sea was a “core concern,” a phrase that placed it on a par with Taiwan and Tibet, its most politically contentious territorial interests.
In response, during a visit to Hanoi in July, Mrs. Clinton hardened Washington’s stance by saying the United States had a “national interest” in freedom of navigation in the area.
In balancing its relations between the two major powers, Vietnam has been at pains to reassure China, the giant on its doorstep, that it would have no alliances, military bases or military coalitions that threatened China.
While Vietnam marked the 15th anniversary of diplomatic ties with the United States this year, it also celebrated a much longer diplomatic relationship of 60 years with China.
Hanoi’s warming toward Washington has also been slowed by suspicions of American motives and commitment to a Vietnam policy, analysts said.
They said Washington’s relations with Vietnam had always been part of larger international interests and could shift as those interests changed.
Once again, as it was during the war, America’s stance toward Vietnam is one piece in a broader China policy.
Toeing a careful line, Vietnam insists that its policies toward the two nations are independent of each other.
“You should not look at Vietnam’s relationship with the United States through the prism of China,” said Nguyen Nam Duong, a research fellow at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, a branch of the Foreign Ministry.
“Vietnam will have independent relations with both the United States and China, and we want to separate those relations from each other,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
Quite apart from their relations with China, the two former wartime enemies have grown steadily closer. Trade relations were normalized in 2006. Port calls by United States naval vessels have become more frequent since the first one in 2003.
“It’s a very deliberate pace that’s being kept here,” said Carlyle Thayer, an expert on Vietnam at the Australian Defense Force Academy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
“Neither side wants to be used by the other, but both want to advance the relationship,” he said.
Mrs. Clinton took an exuberant tone last month when she said, “The progress between Vietnam and the United States has been breathtaking.”
Vietnamese officials have been less effusive, but they seem to agree.
“Vietnam and the United States are enjoying an excellent period of bilateral relations,” the Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Le Cong Phung, said in remarks quoted by the official Vietnam News Agency last month.
However, warming relations have been slowed by American concerns over human rights abuses in Vietnam and by Hanoi’s suspicion that Washington is using the issue to undermine the Communist government.
The Vietnamese often use the phrases “peaceful evolution” and the “color revolutions,” expressions that refer to their view that the collapse of the Soviet Union and other European Communist governments was brought about at least partly by outside support for democracy and human rights.
The competing concerns involving human rights renew themselves in something of a vicious circle. Vietnam’s fear of American motives leads to the arrests of dissidents it sees as connected with the West. And those arrests in turn intensify concerns of the United States over human rights abuses.
The two nations’ alignment on the issue of the South China Sea illustrates the emergence of a more forward-looking relationship, said Kim Ninh, the country representative in Vietnam for The Asia Foundation, which is based in San Francisco.
For the United States, the chief issue from the past continues to be a full accounting for military service members still missing from the war, though that concern no longer carries the power that it once did.
For Vietnam, the chief remaining postwar issue is a demand for greater American assistance in addressing the effects of Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant that was sprayed in parts of the country, causing widespread birth defects.
Mr. Duong of the Foreign Ministry said these postwar issues remained “very relevant.”
“In terms of defense relations, we still need to settle the issues of the past so as to build trust to move toward the future,” he said.
But he said that bilateral relations “have never been better” and that “they can only go upward. They cannot go downward.”
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