Beyond “Dog Wagging the Tail” and “Tail Wagging the Dog”: Vietnamese Foreign Relations and the Cold War Endgame in SEA

[CEOCambodiaNews]

Beyond “Dog Wagging the Tail” and “Tail Wagging the Dog”: Vietnamese Foreign Relations and the Cold War Endgame in Asia as Reflected in Trần Quang Cơ’s Memoir
By Qingfei Yin on July 28, 2023

Tran Quang Co's memoir complicates the existing analysis of the driving forces of both Vietnamese foreign relations and the Cold War endgame in Asia, writes Qingfei Yin.

The memoir of Trần Quang Cơ (1927-2015), former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), brings to light the intense diplomacy among great powers and regional players over the continued conflicts in Indochina after the unification of Vietnam as well as the bitter disagreements within the Vietnamese leadership over the country’s political priorities during the period of 1975-1993.

Trần Quang Cơ put together his memories and thoughts on “many sensitive developments” in Vietnamese foreign relations that he believed had been “intentionally or unintentionally” forgotten (rơi rụng) in the state-endorsed history “to ‘smooth over’ (tròn trĩnh) the historical record.” Completed in Vietnamese in 2001 (updated in 2003) and informally circulated on the internet, the memoir has been used in two important recent works on the history of the Third Indochina War—Kosal Path’s Vietnam's Strategic Thinking During the Third Indochina War and Vu Minh Hoang’s “The Third Indochina War and the Making of Present-Day Southeast Asia,” in which the authors meticulously triangulate the source against the limitedly declassified Vietnamese archival documents.[ii]

Merle Pribbenow’s excellent translation, now available on the Wilson Center Digital Archive, makes this valuable historical source available to wider audiences.

Trần Quang Cơ’s account complicates the existing analysis of the driving forces of both Vietnamese foreign relations and the Cold War endgame in Asia. In the rich body of Vietnam War literature, the Vietnamese Communists are depicted either as ideological fighters of a “proxy war” fueled by military aid from the socialist bloc to confront the West-backed Republic of Vietnam or as cunning nationalists who achieved national unification against the formidable American intervention by manipulating and exploiting the competition between Beijing and Moscow.

From the late-1970s to the end of the Cold War, however, Hanoi quickly lost its room for strategic maneuver and was trapped in a seemingly unwinnable “four-level game,” where advances at one level likely jeopardized the goals at another: 1) to maintain bargaining power against China, the U.S., and the Soviet Union during the bilateral and trilateral détente among the latter three, 2) to reduce ASEAN’s hostility against Vietnam in service to Đổi Mới, 3) to defend the political and military status quo in Cambodia after the toppling of the murderous Khmer Rouge rule and to fight off challenges to Vietnamese status as the dominant power in Indochina, 4) and to take a coherent foreign stance by reconciling the differences between the party leadership and veteran diplomats.

With the search for a political solution to the Cambodian crisis featuring at the center of regional diplomacy, the memoir demonstrates that the end of “regional Cold Wars” in Asia, in the words of Lorenz Lüthi, was not only about economic globalization that integrated socialist countries in the world market but also about the eventual globalization of the nation-state system that had been delayed by Cold War interventionism.[iii]

The centrality of sovereignty to the settlement of the Cambodian crisis highlights the continuities between the three Indochinese Wars. Within the analytical framework of the Cold War, the Third Indochina War – which was a fraternal conflict among the three Communist powers of China, Vietnam, and Cambodia without a direct American role – is often examined separately from the previous two. US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski even characterized the Vietnamese-Cambodian conflict as the first instance of a “proxy war” between the Soviet Union and China.[iv] The delicate relations among the three Indochinese states and between them and outside powers as depicted by Trần Quang Cơ indicate that the wars for Indochina in the second half of the twentieth century could be better understood as a continuous struggle to build nation-states in Indochina to resolve the contested sovereignty triggered by decolonization.
In full: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ ... d-cold-war