U.S. President Joe Biden has nominated American career diplomat Kin Moy to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to Vietnam to succeed the current one, Marc Knapper, according to a recent White House announcement.

President Biden has made his nominations for several key positions within the State Department, including ambassadors to various countries including Vietnam.

Accordingly, Kin Moy, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Career Minister, who is currently Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, has been nominated to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Vietnam.

He previously served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Chief of Mission of the American Institute in Taiwan; and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Mongolia, and Taiwan.

Overseas, Moy once served in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China; the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, Republic of Korea; and the U.S. Consulate in Busan, Republic of Korea. 

He holds degrees from the University of Minnesota and Columbia University, both in the U.S., and can speak Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese.

The ambassador nominee was born in 1966 in Hong Kong and later moved to the U.S. and grew up there.

The approval process for a new U.S. ambassador to Vietnam is expected to take many months, during which the nominee will undergo hearings at the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

President Biden's nomination decision will then be put to a vote before the entire U.S. Senate.

If endorsed by the U.S. Senate, Moy will become the ninth U.S. ambassador to Vietnam since the two countries normalized diplomatic relations in 1995.

He will succeed his predecessor Marc Knapper, who began his term in Vietnam from February 2022.

Marc Knapper, who can speak Vietnamese, once worked at the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam as a political counselor from 2004 to 2007. 

His term witnessed great developments in Vietnam - U.S. relations with many high-level visits and meetings, of which the most prominent was the historic visit by U.S. President Joe Biden to Vietnam at the invitation of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in September 2023.

During this visit, President Biden and General Secretary Trong jointly announced the upgrade of the two countries’ bilateral relations directly from comprehensive partnership to comprehensive strategic partnership, skipping the strategic partnership level.

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