Southeast Asian Perceptions of U.S. Foreign Policy

Abstract

The events that occurred at the end of the 1970s in Southeast Asia, and more broadly in Asia, have seemed to resurrect that region as a focus of American foreign policy. Within Southeast Asia, the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea (Cambodia) was followed by a punitive attack by the People's Republic of China (PRC) on Vietnam to teach it a lesson. The close ties between Vietnam and the Soviet Union-seen in Hanoi's joining the Soviet-sponsored economic grouping COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) and signing the Soviet-Vietnamese friendship treaty, both in 1978-and the increasingly prominent military dimension' of these ties further drew American attention. Other events in Asia, including the warming relations between the United States and China on the one hand and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the other, served to polarize U.S.-Soviet relations and to deepen the U.S. commitment to work with China in an effort to confront Soviet and Vietnamese designs in Southeast Asia. U.S. policy in Southeast Asia over the past five years has sought strenuously to build close ties with the noncommunist states of the area. This article, in addressing the nature and results of that effort, is particularly concerned with how these Southeast Asian states perceive Washington's