Southeast Asia: Accommodation or Surrender?
Kroef, Justus M. van der
J u s t u s M. van d e r Kroef At the close of J u l y this year, Thailand's Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn announced in Bangkok t h a t he was cancelling planned visits to several...
...reaction...
...indeed, in April 1973, Lee, during a Washington visit, even dared to tell the National Press Club that American intervention in Vietnam had broken the string of Communist victories in Asia and thus had prevented "a stampede to the Communist side...
...Given the domestic weaknesses of the Southeast Asian states, t h e i r location in the area of Hanoi's and Peking's expansionist interests at the very time t h a t the USSR also has been mounting a significant diplomatic-strategic offensive in Southeast Asia, and given the continuing uncertainties rising out of the Sino-Soviet dispute no less than out of an administration in Washington emasculated by the Watergate scandal and by its ignoble deception surrounding its Cambodian bombi n g s - - i n light, then, of all these, the urgency now has become one of finding a new political or strategic mechanism t h a t can offer survival...
...Indochina airstrikes on August 15, 1973, political expectations and attitudes concerning the future security of the region had begun to crystallize...
...In 1968, Buchanan noted, Tuck had hired a group of pregnant blacks to parade before the GOP convention with posters saying "Nixon's the One...
...Nor would the United States long defend Cambodia, not even after Sihanouk's removal from power, which, like Sukarno's fall in Indonesia, was a turning point in recent Southeast Asian history that opened up the possibility of dramatic new initiatives in checking the Communist advance in the region...
...Somewhat earlier, Singapore's Premier Lee Kuan Yew had said that retention of U.S...
...Instead, there is mounting concern t h a t new big nation diplomacy and power balance strategies will increasingly make of the lesser countries so many fleeting nuisances or international bagatelles, to be ignored or disposed of as occasion demands...
...Preferred would be survival other than as a client state of any of the super powers...
...In the Philippines, where Foreign Secretary Carlos Romulo has also long been insisting that Southeast Asia develop its own "collective strength" instead of counting on the good will of the major powers to leave the region alone in a presumably "neutralized" state, there has been quiet support for the Indonesian idea...
...Anything that was not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns," said Buchanan...
...Between 1961 and 1971, while the population of the United States grew 11 percent, the number of AFDC recipients rose 216 percent, from 3.2 to 10.2 million (Roger A. Freeman, Testimony before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, January 27, 1972, p. 3...
...Recent Thai attitudes are perhaps most indicative, with the Bangkok government now (1) approving Thai participation in planned "Afro-Asian-Latin American" ping pong tournaments in Peking, (2) speculating on a new "two China" policy, (3) permitting Peking to open up an ECAFE office in Bangkok, (4) instructing its diplomats in various world capitals "to be on cordial terms with the Chinese envoys," and so on (cf...
...This anxiety is sharpened by the wellknown Nixon-Kissinger vision of a "more fluid and heterogeneous multipolar international order," an order which is somehow going to be "more balanced and stable because it rests on broader, more diversified foundations," and reflects "an even balance" between the United States, USSR, People's China, Europe, and Japan...
...Without reform, it would be impossible to avoid either massive tax increases or reduction of other state services or both...
...Rather than promoting ASEAN as a "neutralized" entity, some Indonesian military commanders, more sensitive perhaps than their counterparts in other Southeast Asian capitals to the need for new security initiatives that encompass the region as a whole, have urged that the organization take steps to become a strong political and (in effect) pseudo-military consultative body and alliance as well...
...Public support for reform was increased by frequent news stories of widespread abuses and fraud in the system...
...Unlike the pragmatists of the Nixon regime (and the Kennedy and Johnson regimes before), Buchanan not only recognized a clear value system, but showed that he had lived by it as well...
...Just so, and Beedham's remark well applies to the whole of Southeast Asia as it seeks to survive in the Nixonian "peace in our time ." [] In March 1971 Governor Reagan submitted to the California legislature the most comprehensive welfare reform legislation in the history of the state...
...With neat understatement, a SEATO assessment of the February 21 Laos arrangement declared that "the present agreement seems to have failed to provide adequate guarantees for lasting political stability in Laos...
...the Bangkok Post, Jan...
...The United States' swift repudiation of the coup attempt and endorsement of Souvanna Phouma's policies left no doubt that a de facto Communist Laos is apparently quite satisfactory to the Nixon policies...
...The California Department of Social Welfare had estimated that without reform, the total welfare cost--for federal, state, and county governments--could exceed $3 billion during the coming fiscal year...
...And so in the end, a young conservative, hastily prepared, alone in the hotseat, and fighting calumnious advance leaks, without visible support from his august employer or his pragmatic minions, faced a battery of hanging judges, lascivious lawyers, and politicians whoring after power...
...public was not about to be told of the great issues that hung in the balance in Cambodia, of the danger to the new Lon Nol-Siri Matak regime, and of the promise for all of Indochina implicit in its survival...
...Edward C. Banfield, '~vVelfare: A Crisis without 'solutions'," Public Interest, Summer 1969...
...In any case, within twenty-four hours Saigon reported some eighty violations of the new June 13 cease-fire agreement, setting a pattern that has prevailed until this day...
...By July 1973 Thai Premier Kittikachorn was publicly expressing hope that "time, stability, and mutual understanding" would bring improvements in relations with China...
...reluctance to get into a new !and war in Asia is to a degree appreciated and even lauded in some Southeast Asian capitals...
...The task force completed its work in December and submitted its recommendations to the Governor and the Director of Social Welfare (DSW...
...There are few in the regions' capitals who have failed to note that the Kissinger-Le Duc Tho cease-fire agreements of 1973, coupled to the new U.S...
...The tactic does not expiate guilt, but it pulls the accusers into the dock with the accused...
...These five nations comprise the so-called Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), founded in 1967 as a regional cooperative and consultative grouping...
...The tragic futility of the anti-Communist coup attempt of Laotian General Thao Ma on August 20, 1973, an attempt apparently made in order to halt the de facto surrender by Premier Souvanna Phouma to the Communists, also highlighted American intentions...
...drive for Chinese and Soviet cordiality, have, in effect, handed Peking and Moscow considerable veto power over future American retaliatory ability (even if the latter could get past the Congress...
...This agreement in effect legalizes the Communist conquest of nearly half of the kingdom (accomplished, since 1962, in the slow, standard, "two steps forward, one step back" manner perfected by Southeast Asian Communists careful not to arouse alarm and massive counterstrikes), compels the remainder to be governed by a coalition government, and tacitly permits the continuing presence in Laos of thousands of North Vietnamese forces while mentioning U.S...
...Slowly but steadily ASEAN has evolved into a major international forum and policy coordinating body for the whole of Southeast Asia...
...Buchanan separated political tactics into four categories ranging from the perfectly legal and ethical to the illegal and outrageous, thus lending proportion to the whole issue...
...Buchanan's testimony marked the beginning of an important deflation of the whole Watergate embroglio, and a return to normalcy...
...The tent revival was looking for sinners, and having run out of the third and fourth cousins of any principals in the Watergate affair, they fastened upon the President's conservative speechifier as one who had all sorts of sinful possibilities...
...In California, the level of welfare payments cannot have been to blame, because real benefits in the state did not increase at all between 1960 and 1969 (cf...
...Will, for example, the United States, Japan, or Western Europe, as the world energy crisis worsens, remain indifferent to the vast untapped off-shore oil reserves in the Gulf of Siam, the South China Sea, or the inter-insular Philippine waters...
...Nixon's "fluid" and "multipolar" international system will survive...
...Buchanan readily acknowledged the moral weakness of the tu quoque: two wrongs don't make a right...
...readiness to sustain regions already committed to an active, first-line defense of their territory against Communist attack, not only against external invasion (e.g., continued North Vietnamese military encroachment in Laos and Cambodia, or the Chinese troops in northern Laos or northeastern Burma) but against the more insidious forms of foreign-supported domestic Communist insurgency (of which Thailand is perhaps the best known but by no means the only Southeast Asian example...
...F i r s t we must note that U.S...
...one Singapore student editor plaintively remarked to me at the time...
...Doesn't your Mr...
...Some countries of the area, notably Thailand and the island state of Singapore, gently or vociferously made it plain, at first, that a continuing and direct American military presence in Southeast Asia was indispensible...
...Whatever ideas the Nixon Administration might have had of exploiting the fall of Sihanouk soon vanished as the upsurge in antiwar hysteria in the United States, ably fanned by the Hanoids around the world at the time of the Cambodian invasion, made it clear (if Nixon needed to be reminded) how the dynamics of domestic American politics on the war operated...
...The reason why such a contention is illusory is because it assumes The Alternative December 1973 5 a belief that the United States necessarily has the will to use its countervailing power in order to prevent Sino-Soviet hostility from exploding, say, over future friction in Southeast Asia...
...Deputy Foreign Minister Chartchai Chunhawan meanwhile declared that Thailand was now ready to discuss the withdrawal of American forces from his country, adding that "our policy is the same as that of American congressmen who want their troops recalled" a rather sharp volte-face compared to Chartchai's position a few months earlier...
...But elsewhere, especially in Malaysia, some are convinced that an accommodation with People's China must be made, and others are equally certain that too strong an ASEAN, particularly a militarized one, would inevitably lead to sharp confrontation with Peking...
...In August 1970, the Governor appointed a special task force to study all aspects of the problem and recommend a total strategy for addressing it...
...Lee, on this particular occasion at least (for he has not always been so sanguine), may have been unduly optimistic...
...Lee himself has warned a visiting delegation of Australian politicians in Singapore in November 1972 that any power vacuum in his region, including one resulting from the withdrawal of token British, Australian, and New Zealand forces now stationed in Singapore, would quickly be filled by the Soviets...
...All of this is nonsense, not only insofar as Vietnam is concerned, but also insofar as virtually all of the rest of Southeast Asia is concerned...
...But of the ideological complexion of the regime they seek to establish, with or without Sihanouk, there can be little doubt...
...By early August, yet another agreement was in the works between the Pathet Lao and Laotian government, designed to legitimize still further Communist gains...
...Reflecting the trend, by the end of the sixties, the courts were striking down as "discriminatory" regulations limiting eligibility and expanding rights to eligibility where they had not existed before...
...military contingent in Thailand, urged on by the growing fluttering in the congressional and academic dovecotes...
...There is no indication t h a t the super-states are really willing to work out a mutual modus vivendi in Southeast Asia...
...As has been cogently observed by Professor David Nelson Rowe: "Our refusal to take in Vietnam the comparatively minor military risks which might have settled that conflict years ago because we did not want to get involved with Communist China" hardly argues in favor of an American willingness now to become "directly involved militarily between Communist China and the USSR" (Issues and Studies [Taipei], May 1970, p. 2O...
...The fact that he is a principled man puts a great chasm between him and his colleagues (although he would surely protest such an assertion...
...prevarication in its Indochina policies...
...In January 1971 the Go~ernor appointed a new secretary to the Human Relations Agency, which coordinates all of the state social service departments, and a new director to the State Department of Social Welfare...
...Buchanan reminded the Lords Spiritual that in 1962 Democratic trickster Dick Tuck had bamboozled the engineer of the Nixon campaign train to chug off in the middle of a Nixonian homily...
...The background of the reforms can be found in the nation-wide welfare explosion that began in the mid-sixties...
...Buchanan was something of a hero when he returned to the White House...
...It was a performance so favorable to the Nixon Administration that the TV networks abruptly canceled further Watergate telecasts (alleging, of course, that they were now boring...
...But there are other and, to some, more sanguine policy approaches, in which nominally Thailand and Singapore, and some other countries of the region, also share...
...The question, as Thai and Singapore spokesmen are fond of stressing these days, is whether Mr...
...And when Buchanan was accused of the horrible felony of getting onto Democratic mailing lists, Buchanan shot back that the tactic was, after all, endorsed in Democratic Chairman O'Brien's campaign manual...
...Southeast Asian considerations are more parochial than that...
...Even the Right Reverend Sam Dash met his match: "What tactics would I be willing to use...
...or other foreign military "dominance" of their own countries and region...
...He had, moreover, the maturity to recognize that all the dirty tricks in the world had upon the course of events no more than the weight of a feather...
...Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's Labour government, apparently obsessed with transforming his country into People's China's dearest Asian-Pacific friend as soon as possible, had begun preparations for an "incremental" withdrawal of his own, i.e., of the remaining Australian military support units in Singapore and of the two Australian Mirage jet fighter squadrons stationed in Western Malaysia, which have been part of the now rapidly deteriorating so-called Commonwealth Five Power Defense agreement (involving Malaysia, Singapore, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand...
...But the U.S...
...Against the vigorous opposition of the welfare lobby, by early August the Democratic legislature passed more than 70 percent of the Governor's proposals, and on August 13, 1971, the California Welfare Reform Act of 1971 became law...
...In light of this one wonders what Dr...
...A few numbers will recall the extent of the problem...
...Ideological and strategic splits in the Communist camp have somehow made little tactical difference to those in Southeast Asia confronted by domestic Communist subversion and external pressure...
...and "How far must we accommodate Peking and Hanoi in Nixon's new super power diplomacy...
...Between 1964 and 1971, the total number of welfare recipients rose from 7.7 million to 14.4 million, from an annual cost of $5 billion to $18 billion...
...Horatio had defended the bridge...
...Nixon see what an opportunity has come his way...
...At about the same time, in Bangkok, Dr...
...The Communist forces in Cambodia (among them some 30,000 to 40,000 North Vietnamese) are not a homogeneous force to be sure...
...They included controlling the overall cost of welfare, reducing the rolls to the truly needy, reforming county and state administrations, requiring those able to work to do so, increasing assistance to the truly needy, and strengthening family responsibility...
...The need for reform was dramatized by one Oakland woman whose $14,000 annual income somehow still did not prevent her being on the rolls...
...to say that, after all, subscribing to your opponent's mail list had no evil in it, but that phony letters aimed at dividing the opposition were worse, and that bugging or furtive character assassination were worse still...
...Tu quoque...
...It is remarkable, then, that in some American quarters a return of Sihanouk to power in Phnom Penh is believed to be the only solution to Cambodia's problems...
...For one of the illusions flowing from the much vaunted Nixon initiatives toward Peking and Moscow is t h a t these presumably have given Washington new leverage in dealing with the Communists, permitting her to side now with one, then with the other Communist super power in order to keep the tensions between them within bounds, or...
...Tu quoque...
...Buchanan's contribution was to restore the grays...
...6-7) reported that despite their mutual ethnic The Alternative December 1973 7 and political suspicions, "common agreement" had been reached among North Koreans, Chinese, North Vietnamese, and the Communist forces in Cambodia and Laos, in respect to "treating the whole of Indochina as one common Communist cause...
...The present writer knows of no one in Southeast Asia who believes that Moscow will somehow check Hanoi or Peking in their continuing attempts to subvert their neighbors...
...Tu quoque...
...In conversations with Thai and Singapore defense officials in June 1973, I heard variants on the same theme and open skepticism that, even in its modified form under the Nixon Doctrine, an ultimate American deterrent can still be trusted...
...thrust into Cambodia in May 1970 thus had to be sold to the American public on the basis of its potential relief for remaining American forces in Vietnam, not on the basis of what it might mean to the beleaguered anti-Communists in Phnom Penh who with one stroke had opened such a significant new perspective on the Indochina war...
...Not only was North Vietnam continuing to pour its troops, tanks, and heavy a r t i l l e r y into South Vietnam, despite the cease-fire agreement, Thanom charged...
...Already in March of 1973, when it had become abundantly clear that the January 27 Vietnam "ceasefire" wasn't working, Thailand's Deputy Premier Prapass Charusathiara warned against undue expectations about the efficacy of the Laos and Vietnam agreements, adding that peace hopes for Southeast Asia "are only a dream...
...The net effect of Buchanan's testimony was to restore sanity and moral order to the national consciousness...
...Besides, North Vietnam and the Communist countergovernments of Laos and Cambodia want nothing to do with ASEAN...
...With heroic disregard of American academic deprecation of the domino theory, Lee asserted that without the Thai "buffer" the "spread of indigenous Communism supported by fraternal parties in neighboring countries" of Southeast Asia, would be "a foregone conclusion...
...In its absence the Nixon Doctrine and the "multipolar international order" seem but schemes to legalize Southeast Asia's new client status vis-a-vis Hanoi, Moscow, or Peking...
...More likely, the problem was caused by evangelistic welfare bureaucrats, assisted by the 1967 federal welfare regulation amendments...
...Early in 1973, for example, the Chinese News Analysis (Hong Kong, May 4, 1973, pp...
...And he carried the day...
...For the same reason there have been no takers (least of all in Washington) for such blue-sky ideas as Lee Kuan Yew's suggestion last May that the United States, Japan, Australia, and some Western European powers establish a joint naval task force, stationed in Singapore, to help keep the peace in the region ("an obviously dissonant note," Pravda commented on May 13, 1973, attributable to ~'the provocative and subversive policies of Peking's leaders...
...Thai Deputy Foreign Minister Chartchai Chunhawan, at about the same time, said that U.S...
...A brief glance at the sophisticated powerplays between President Thieu and his opponents in the South Vietnamese parliament, at the alignment and realignment of political parties in Indonesia, at the lively voter appreciation of ethnic and other pluralistic constituency-balancing in elections in Malaysia and Singapore, or at the formation and expression of political opposition to the Marcos government in the Philippines, will soon convince one that it isn't...
...The choice was rather simple: either the system was reformed to bring the situation under control, or it would overwhelm the state budget...
...air forces in Thailand would be "an American demonstration of their clear intention that the [Nixon] Doctrine will be implemented...
...The prevailing state of affairs reminds one of the last days of the Roman Empire, when, with security and order collapsing, remaining imperial officials exhorted all men to find their own individual protectors...
...Consider, for instance, the miasma of unreality that surrounds the KissingerLe Duc Tho January 27, 1973, cease-fire agreement on Vietnam...
...But it is true, nonetheless, that Buchanan had within him through his entire service to Richard Nixon a clear inner vision that enabled him to draw the boundaries of honor and stay within them...
...But Buchanan had a powerful understanding of what such an argument achieves in a political arena...
...experience in Vietnam by Ms...
...It was enough to arouse an American burgher to apoplexy, for there on his TV was a clearly innocent man in the hotseat, telling all the world that his accusers were by no means political virgins...
...The task force set forth six overall objectives, which became the basis of the Governor's program...
...Ten years later, when the Governor submitted his proposals, the caseload had grown to 2.3 million: at a time when the state economy was booming, for several years California's welfare caseload had been growing at a rate of 40,000 per month, and there were signs the rate of growth was increasing (in fiscal year 1968-1969, the annual growth rate increased from a range of 8-13 percent to a peak of 24 percent in 1970-71...
...pressure the Royal Laotian government was, on February 2I, 1973, induced to sign an agreement with the Communist Pathet Lao...
...As for South Vietnam, so also for Laos where, thanks to strong U.S...
...to drain away the revival-tent sanctimony of those pillars of pulchritude, Sam Dash, the Honorable Ervin, and the Connecticut Windturmel...
...By early May, 1973, the North Vietnamese (according to the New York Times) had slipped into the northern parts of South Vietnam "thousands of tons of ammunition, arms and military equipment," including surface-toair missiles, tanks, and heavy anti-aircraft guns, and continuing fighting and mounting evidence of North Vietnamese plans for an impending major offensive in the South ripped the last remnants of the January cease-fire agreement to shreds...
...For the young Southeast Asian states it is not the trenchant western academic criticism by the Hoffmans and the Brzezinskis, to the effect t h a t the Nixon envisaged balance of power is unlikely to be achieved, t h a t is a primary justification for alarm...
...William Sullivan, suggested that Hanoi had ambitions to control all of Indochina "and consequently had failed to fulfill its obligations under the Paris agreements...
...Throughout this volume runs a theme heard in a thousand Vietnam teach-ins of the past, namely that to the Vietnamese the making of choices among alternative forms of government, or of candidates for office, '~appeared quite absurd," that because Vietnamese are allegedly more interested in the political mystique of the prevailing "will of Heaven," the proposition that voting in an election might actually change the character of government is "an almost impermissible" notion to them, that the democratic process of balancing out the different constituencies was and is not of interest to them, and so on...
...The consequences of all this are best summarized by the title of a recent essay on the future of the Southeast Asian countries in the most prestigious Far Eastern news weekly: "To Peking, slowly...
...have been marred by malversations at the ballot box (similar, say, to those in the 1960 presidential election tabulation in Cook County, Illinois), by poor voter turnouts COnly 55.7 percent of all Americans old enough to be eligible to vote bothered to cast a vote for president" in 1972, Theodore H. White in his study of that election has observed), and by attempts to smear, embarrass, or obstruct opposition parties and candidates (Watergate, anyone...
...Well before the formal cessation of U.S...
...Meanwhile, in a United States weary of and sick at heart with its Vietnam venture, the "why die for Danzig" syndrome is now well in plade, and its validity as policy can only be tested by the passage of time...
...Their particular conception of a neutralization of the region is one in which none of the present ASEAN governments would be permitted to survive...
...But up until Buchanan spoke, no one had made similar distinctions in the realm of politics, least of all the impresarios who, lacking all sense of gray, had divided the world into sinners and saints...
...18, March 26, May 29, 1973...
...Frances G. FitzGerald, entitled Fire in the Lake...
...In only three months, the task force had uncovered massive abuses in the welfare system, which were hurting both taxpayers and those recipients whose need was real...
...Continuing the momentum of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, welfare workers set about to sell the glories of life on the dole and thereby recruited recipients, who, though legally entitled to receive benefits, had not previously received them...
...For a key element of t h a t doctrine, t h a t the United States henceforth expects to "look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense" has for some time been in accord with the tactical considerations of most Southeast Asian leaders themselves, well aware of the nationalist sensitivities of their citizenries about alleged U.S...
...There remains, however, one currently popular rationalization for this syndrome that needs to be disposed of in closing...
...Chief intellectual inspiration for the effort came from the Columbia School of Social Work, where Professors Cloward and Piven were arguing that the welfare system was a plot against the poor and that the only hope for genuine "reform" lay in overloading the rolls and breaking the system (Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor [New York, Random House], 1971...
...The situation in California was deteriorating even more rapidly than in the rest of the country...
...In politics the tu quoque has explosive power, especially in the milieu of a holy inquisition...
...But this is not the same thing as saying that to the Vietnamese, or to others in Southeast Asia, making political choices is either absurd, or incomprehensible, or "impermissible...
...And can anyone envisage the Chinese forcibly (or otherwise) restraining the North Vietnamese from establishing their de facto satellites in Luang Prabang and Phnom Penh, or Hanoi preventing Peking from continuing to supply and train the Thai Communist movement as the latter steadily expands its operations and begins to engage the Thai Army in larger scale, set-piece battles, involving thousands on both sides...
...The preachers were chilled...
...And so, caught between, on the one hand, the American retreat from Indochina and the grave debilitation of such erstwhile regional security mechanisms as SEATO (reeling under Pakistan's withdrawal, France's refusal to pay its customary contribution, and Australia's hostility to it) and, on the other hand, the hope that a condition of quiescent, near defencelessness will somehow persuade the major powers to leave the region alone, Southeast Asia searches for a format for regional security and domestic stability...
...South Vietnam's reaction to the neutralization idea has been to the point: "We have become the victims of aggression and how can we be neutral...
...J u s t u s M. van d e r Kroef At the close of J u l y this year, Thailand's Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn announced in Bangkok t h a t he was cancelling planned visits to several Southeast Asian neighbor states in view of the increasing gravity of the situation in Indochina...
...Foreign Minister Tran Van Lam said in Djakarta last July after talks with his Indonesian opposite number on the subject...
...Neither the steady, "incremental" Communist conquest of Laos and Cambodia, nor the new threat this would pose to an already beleaguered Thailand, nor an escalation of the North Vietnamese effort to subjugate South Vietnam, nor, again, a weakening of the Marcos government in the Philippines in the face of both an ou.tright Maoist insurgency in Luzon, and the Maoist infiltrated Muslim rebellion in Mindanao, would or could now provoke an effective U.S...
...Kissinger's assistant, Mr...
...mind," and (2) that it is too mysterious to understand and, anyhow, ought not to When the Watergate traveling tent revival meeting, still conducting faith healing down on Pennsylvania Avenue, suddenly invited Patrick Buchanan, the White House conservative, to the baptismal font, Buchanan was ready for them, although in this glorious age of due process he had received the barest possible notice...
...Kissinger hoped to gain by signing yet another cease-fire agreement with Le Duc Tho in Paris on June 13 (or rather by pledging, along with the Saigon and Hanoi governments, and the Vietcong, "to strictly respect" the January cease-fire agreement), or by adhering to such meaningless promises as respect for the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos (where fighting immediately intensified...
...Buchanan's response was not to dwell at length upon his innocence--although he pronounced it for the record---but rather he introduced the matter of tu quoque, or "you, too...
...As for Singapore, the hardliners in its ruling People's Action Party have won the day for new massive increases in total annual defense expenditures (now approximating a third of its gross national product) accentuating the island republic's favorite selfimage as a "poisoned shrimp" which an enemy might be foolish enough to try to swallow, but which would be impossible to keep down...
...Now in morals this is the weakest of defenses, but in politics it takes on a different nature...
...Thus India, in August 1971, confronted with the Bangla Desh catastrophe and its dangerous international implications, dropped all further pretense of "non-aligned" status a~d formally opted for Soviet protection and a twenty-year security treaty with Moscow...
...In any event, in his message to the legislature, Governor Reagan warned that without reform of the laws, the rolls could reach three million in California by July 1972...
...Simply put, this is the argument that the United States had and has no business in Vietnam or Southeast Asia because what Americans presumably want for the region (freedom of political choice and expression, democratic elections, self-determination in modern nationhood, and so on), either was not understood, or was resented, or in any case was and is a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of the region...
...Thai leaders are already beginning to answer their own questions, 6 The Alternative December 1973 however...
...Thanom's announcement underscored again t h a t with the failure of the January 27 Paris cease-fire agreement--a failure compounded to the point of farce by the June 13 reiteration of the original cease-fire accord--the Southeast Asian states today are further than ever from attaining t h a t measure of individual or collective security and peace t h a t would permit them to sustain much needed economic and public administrative growth with reasonable stability...
...The question, r a t h e r , is about the U.S...
...If this position seemed perverse to some people, it nevertheless reflected a national change in attitude toward welfare...
...The brief "surgical" U.S...
...He faced them alone with a clearer conscience than any of his accusers...
...Thus he doused the whole sawdust-andsweat road show in ice water...
...As was their custom, they leaked a few mendacious stories to the press, by way of prelude, and then invited the sinner to defend himself...
...But ASEAN members differ widely on the present viability of the neutralization concept, although all see it, at least in theory, as a policy ideal...
...Buchanan's technique was doubly effective because he actually was innocent, by all accounts, of the entire Watergate episode...
...Staffed by key members of his administration, the task force conducted over 700 in-depth interviews with federal, state, and county officials, systematically reviewed federal and state laws and regulations, and studied the organizational and fiscal dimensions of the problem...
...Recent Chinese editorials, as well as pronouncements by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the North Korean capital, underscored this convergence which, certainly in a strategic sense, and so far as the remaining committed anti-Communists in the Southeast Asian region are concerned, is far more important than occasional outbursts of hostility between Cambodian Reds and their North Vietnamese allies over available supplies of rice at the front, or between the Pathet Lao and the underground Thai Communist movement over control over the Thai-Laotian border areas...
...We have the Prince's own conviction on record that "Cambodia will become Communist, and it is only right that it become Communist because the revolution that the Khmer Rouge have made in the liberated areas [in Cambodia] has succeeded...
...To deny the Vietnamese the right of choice by denying that they want it, would be the last disservice the Americans could perform for that unfortunate people," Brian Beedham in his critique of the FitzGerald book has written...
...Tu quoque...
...As Singapore's Premier Lee Kuan Yew put it last March 17: "For small countries the question now is not how to avoid being sucked into the warring camps of the two great powers, but how to have their interests taken into consideration when the great powers reach their compromises...
...This, a more sophisticated version of the old argument that (1) there is a Southeast Asian---or Vietnamese, or Laotian, or Indonesian, etc...
...The first stage of reform began almost immediately...
...There is, for example, the scheme to "neutralize" Southeast Asia in the manner of Austrial say, and to try and persuade all the major powers henceforth to leave the region alone...
...The reasons for the welfare boom have been widely debated...
...In moral theory one makes distinctions between, say, hookers, mistresses, amateurs, the inexperienced, the wayward, the much-married, the married, the untempted, the raped, and the virgins...
...Malaysia, though confronted with persistent, Pekingbacked, Communist guerrilla insurgency, both along its eastern border with Thailand and its western border with Indonesia, has been the chief champion of this idea, ultimately succeeding in persuading the foreign ministers of its neighbors, specifically Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, to endorse "neutralization" officially on November 27, 1971, in the so-called "Kuala Lumpur Declaration...
...to win an acceptable new modus vivendi in Southeast Asia...
...retreat, even from its remaining treaty responsibilities,has markedly grown in the Southeast Asian region...
...In March 1961, California had 620,000 welfare recipients...
...That a Peking which continues to proclaim that "We shall certainly liberate Taiwan," as well as urge the need for "complete victory" in the "national liberation" struggles of the Third World, will also persist in its policies to make that complexion conform to its interests is equally certain...
...Their job was to help develop legislative reforms and implement a large number of administraThe Alternative December 1973 9...
...It is, after all, acutely embarrassing when a squalling victim is reminded that he himself is a famous victimizer...
...As for Burma, its rigid notion of neutrality does not even permit siding publicly with ASEAN's idea of it, though of late, as the European Common Market countries have increasingly begun dealing with the Southeast Asian region through ASEAN and its new permanent secretariat in Djakarta, trade necessity is forcing second thoughts in Rangoon...
...To be sure, the elections that have been held in the past decade in South Vietnam (or in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, etc...
...And so, when the preachers of the Gospel of Political Virginity bored in on Buchanan, the feisty defender of the Nixon regime bored back, relentlessly reminding the preachers of their own dalliances...
...The point is worth stressing...
...Up to a point the Nixon Doctrine presents no problem to Southeast Asia...
...airforce units "must continue to be based in Thailand" until "real peace in Indochina" prevailed...
...Since the summer of 1973 all one's conversations with Thai diplomats and top military spokesmen have begun to pivot on two questions that reflect Thailand's dilemma: "What, now, is the Nixon Doctrine worth--after Cambodia, Laos, and the failure of the Vietnam cease-fire...
...but also, according to the Thai Premier, North Vietnamese and Communist.Pathet Lao forces in Laos were moving closer to Thailand's own northern and northeastern border provinces, the very region where a Communist guerrilla insurgency, which Bangkok claims is supported by Peking, the Pathet Lao, and Hanoi has been in progress...
...Such heresies, predictably, got little official or media attention in the United States, and by August 1973 it had been announced that the United States would shortly begin discussions on "incremental reductions" of its B-52 bomber fleet and 40,000 man U.S...
...By the end of the sixties the media had us thinking in terms of welfare "rights," and the National Welfare Rights Association for a short while became a major dispenser of wisdom on social matters...
...This strong opposition has virtually killed the idea of a stronger ASEAN...
...Nothing, then, would be permitted to interfere with the American retreat...
...The profound disquiet among key Southeast Asian leaders today regarding the future credibility of American power is deepened by persistent evidence of apparent U.S...
...Richard Wheeler 8 The Alternative December 1973 be tampered with by westerners, is encountered, for example, in the recently published study of the U.S...
...and Thai forces by name as among the foreign troops to be withdrawn...
...But the valueless, pragmatic technicians of the Nixonian Era still do not understand the source of Buchanan's confidence...
...Fear t h a t the Nixon Doctrine is but a fig leaf for a US...
...Several lines of development have intersected to bring about the region's present predicament...
Vol. 7 • December 1973 • No. 3
