Vietnam's Strategic Thinking During the Third Indochina War.

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Guan, Ang Cheng

Vietnam's Strategic Thinking During the Third Indochina War. By Kosal Path. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. Hardcover: 291pp.

In stark contrast to the voluminous literature on the First and Second Indochina Wars, studies on the Third Indochina War are few and far between. Kosal Path rightly highlights only two books in English that focus on the Vietnamese perspective of the Third Indochina War. But even in those two books, namely David W.P Elliot's Changing Worlds: Vietnam's Transition from Cold War to Globalization (2012) and Tuong Vu's Vietnam's Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (2017), that conflict only forms part of their overall stories.

Kosal Path's Vietnam's Strategic Thinking is therefore a pioneering and targeted study of the conflict covering the period from 1975 to 1986. The book addresses two fundamental questions about the Third Indochina War: why did Vietnam "engage in a costly program of regime change and nation building" in Cambodia which ended in failure, and what caused the Vietnamese to subsequently "withdraw its forces from Cambodia and shift from military confrontation to reconciliation with China" (p. 3)? The author believes the answers to these questions can best be found by perusing the "large volume of internal reports circulated within the top leadership of the Vietnamese party and government at that time", which he did so...