New Omnidirectional Overtures in Thai Foreign Policy

Abstract

Eleven years have passed since a most dramatic event occurred in Southeast Asia. The trauma of the Vietnam War, characterized by the dramatic fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, to Communist forces, suddenly pushed Thailand into the forefront of Southeast Asian regional politics. Cambodia had fallen on April 17 to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, and the Laotian monarchy was toppled in December of the same year and replaced by a Pathet Lao government close to Hanoi. Thailand therefore became a frontline state of the ASEAN bloc, facing a Communist Indochina, and there were fears for the future of Thailand, in view of Dwight Eisenhower's famous domino theory and the failure of John Foster Dulles's containment policy in Southeast Asia. Now eleven years later, war still rages in Indochina, inside Cambodia and on the borders between Thailand and Cambodia and between Vietnam and China. A third Vietnam War was fought between Hanoi and Beijing (formerly a staunch and principal Vietnamese backer) in February 1979 after Vietnam had sent its troops into Cambodia to rout out Pol Pot during the Christmas season of 1978. Vietnam installed the Heng Samrin puppet regime in Phnom Penh and thus achieved Ho Chi Minh's dream of uniting the three branches of the same river' in an Indochinese Federation under Hanoi's guidance. Vietnam has thus succeeded in weaving a web of special relations2 with Vientiane and Phnom Penh. Today ASEAN, and especially Thailand, opposes the Vietnamese fait accompli in Cambo-