Abstract
Only two and one-half years ago the security situation in Southeast Asia seemed almost tranquil. Major actors appeared to be devoting their energies to domestic development and consolidation. North Vietnam, hoping quietly to assimilate its southern counterpart, imposed a socialist scheme only gradually and carefully below the 17th parallel. Moreover, Hanoi seemed content to permit the Pathet Lao considerable flexibility in emplacing a communist structure onto the traditionally relaxed Laos society. Even the prickly Khmer Rouge were al-lowed their primitivist version of Marxism with scarcely a murmur of public disapproval from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV).
The People’s Republic of China (PRC), then emerging from domes-tic political turmoil, began to create the outlines of what would become the most pronounced shift to the right in its socioeconomic affairs since 1949. Both Hanoi and Beijing were turning outward in search of capital, trade, and technology, soliciting the industrial democracies of Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia. The period also seemed propitious for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). With both of its major potential adversaries courting the West and intent on development, perhaps ASEAN’s hope for the creation of a Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) in Southeast Asia was closer to realization than its leaders had dared to hope when the proposal was first broached in 1971.
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