A war in the Middle East is now showing up in Vietnamese grocery bills.
Inflation in Vietnam jumped to 5.46% in April.
That's past forecasts and past the government's comfort zone.
Vietnam's National Statistics Office released data Sunday.
Consumer prices climbed 5.46% in April from the same month last year.
That topped the 4.80% rise economists had expected.
Most of the jump came from rising gas prices inside Vietnam, which followed global fuel prices higher.
Pricier raw materials and transport then bled into services and construction costs.
The State Bank of Vietnam now expects inflation to hit as much as 5.5% this year.
That's well above the official target of 4.5%.
The same forces showed up in trade data.
Vietnam posted a $3.28 billion trade gap in April, the country's fourth straight month in the red.
That gap was far wider than the $400 million experts had expected.
Imports surged 32.5% to $48.8 billion.
Most of those imports were raw materials, equipment, and spare parts feeding the country's factories.
Exports climbed 21% to $45.5 billion.
That was faster than expected, but not fast enough to keep up with what was coming in.
Through the first four months of 2026, Vietnam's trade gap with China widened 33.4% to $46.4 billion.
Its trade surplus with the U.S. grew 24.4% to $46.9 billion in the same window.
Vietnam set a 10% growth target for 2026, one of the most aggressive in Asia.
The State Bank of Vietnam is now squeezed between two jobs.
It has to keep prices and the dong stable while still hitting that growth number.
Energy makes that hard.
Vietnam imports most of its fuel.
Economists estimate every $10-per-barrel rise in oil prices shaves about 0.2 points off GDP growth and adds 0.3 to 0.4 points to inflation.
That math gets worse the longer the Iran war drags on.
Fuel prices have been the biggest single driver of the inflation pickup.
The dong has held up so far, but a wider trade gap puts more pressure on it.
The central bank has pledged to keep the dong stable, but that pledge gets harder to hold the longer fuel costs stay high.
A weaker dong would also push the price of imports up, which would feed even more inflation into the system.
Vietnam is also one of the most trade-heavy economies in Asia.
Total trade is worth more than 150% of GDP, which means a swing in import costs hits the country harder than it would hit a more closed economy.
That's part of why every move in oil shows up so fast in Vietnamese prices.
The country has tools to push back, like fuel tax cuts and price controls on key goods.
But each of those tools costs the government money or pushes inflation into another part of the economy.
The State Bank of Vietnam has so far kept its policy rate steady, hoping the inflation pickup is a one-time fuel shock and not a deeper trend.
Inflation is heading the wrong way, and the war driving it is still going.
Hanoi wanted 10% growth this year.
The Strait of Hormuz is making that math harder by the month.
