President Nguyen Ngoc Truong’s speech at CSSD opening ceremony

Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Truong delivered a speech at the opening ceremony of CSSD

The center seems to be new, but not the members. Three advisors, including Amb. Pham Van Que, Lieutenant General Ho Si Tue, Dr. Nguyen Dinh Luan and me formed “the four pillars” that decide CSSD’s orientation, as well as directly conduct and operate multiple research programs. We do research together, counter-argue with each other. After a time of piloting, drawing experience as well as adjusting. And today, the four pillars of CSSD officially “make a debut”.

CSSD’s members do have a dream as illustrated in our logo, i.e. “Trên cánh chim Việt, Bay cùng thế giới” (temporarily translated as ‘unleash Vietnamese wings’).

In recent years, the world has undergone numerous crises and complex transformation, posing both challenges and opportunities.

Each country, each individual is equal to those challenges and opportunities. Not only do chances come to countries but also organizations; we created CSSD because we realized our chance. That chance is an open and renovating country - Vietnam, on the course of far-reaching integration with international life.

That chance is a nation which has a population of nearly 100 million, possessing an important geopolitical position in Southeast Asia and the East Sea - a crucial part of the Asia-Pacific region. That chance is that Asia is turning into a dynamic, developing economic center despite embedding various political and security instabilities. That chance is that the interest of many Vietnamese in international issues is burgeoning. Meanwhile, the world is also keen on understanding Vietnam, as well as its stances on international issues.

Above all, it is our desire to make a small contribution to the privatization of strategic research, including major power politics, Vietnam’s foreign policy and development strategies and history of international relations, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. A focus of focuses is to conduct research on major power political issues in East Asia that is closely related to our country. Among those, strategic forecast is one of our important missions. The today world is becoming more and more unusual and unpredictable. However, strategic studies cannot exist without strategic forecast, as a principle of Ho Chi Minh’s diplomatic ideology stated, “Knowing everything beforehand is a golden key to success”. 

That is our defined target. But with the preliminary budget, we can only choose suitable focal topics step by step. We will expand our scope of operations depending on the situation. 

It is conspicuous that the world today operates by “networks”. CSSD will pay attention to building up a network of collaborators. This is a hugely abundant resource, consisting of researchers, policy makers and retired officials who are still in good health, experience and enthusiasm to contribute.

After operating for a short period of time, the good news is that the research mission of CSSD is on the right track. Our website has just been established, and it is still on a test run. We intend to build a website with high quality, which can be useful for researchers, policy-makers. At the same time, our website will make a focus on the domestic and foreign readers who are interested in current issues and Vietnam’s viewpoint on important international and regional issues. It can be said that we still have a lot of space to develop, but a massive of challenges are still ahead.

The “development” part has not made much progress although our operating license has a broad scope of operation, including commercial cooperative consultation and technology transfer. We are searching for suitable directions and partners. This will be the following operation content of CSSD. If we do well, it will support the process of strategic studies and the website quality improvement.

The presence of the distinguished guests today provided a significant support for CSSD. As a newborn institution, we need your attention, help and cooperation, especially for different columns of the website. Some articles will be translated to English./.