The Third Indochina War

Main l and Southeast Asia has once again became a quagmire of conflict. Since December 1978 between 150,000 and 220,000 Vietnamese troops have occupied Cambodia. Elements of this force have been involved in small cross-border operations in Thailand and have on several occasions seemed on the verge of launching a punitive attack on that country. The Thai are expanding their armed forces by a third and are shopping for more weapons in Washington. Malaysia, Indonesia, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and the United States have promised to come to Thailand's aid if it is attacked. In February 1979 Beijing invaded northern Vietnam to punish Hanoi for its invasion of Cambodia. Although it withdrew its troops, China has left several hundred thousand men on Vietnam's border. Hundreds of thousands of people who have fled their homes by boat from Vietnam and by land from Laos and Cambodia are cooped up in squalid refugee camps in poor and hostile neighboring countries, waiting for someone to take them in. The current turmoil is a resumption of historic patterns of conflict that colonial rule forced into abeyance. American withdrawal from Indochina represented the exit of the last non-Asian power from the region. Southeast Asian states are more free now than at any other time in the last century to deal with one another without outside interference. The current conflicts are a complex brew of ancient ethnic antagonisms, limited conflict for local