Vietnam's Strategic Thinking During the Third Indochina War.

• 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 over five research trips to Vietnam beginning in 2006 (p. 11). In his assessment, these internally circulated records are "superior to other party documents and memoirs used in the existing scholarship" (p. 11).

The two above questions are succinctly answered through a very readable and coherent narrative spanning six chapters. Chapter One describes the short period from the end of the Second Indochina War in April 1975 to mid-1977 when the priority of the Vietnamese leadership was economic recovery. During this period, the "economy-first" faction within the leadership held sway. However, the failure to achieve its economic goals and "failure in foreign policy and diplomacy abroad" forced the Vietnamese leadership to shift its focus to national defence. As relations with Cambodia and China deteriorated, the "military-first" faction gradually took control of the levers of power and remained influential for much of the 1980s. In early 1978, the Vietnamese leadership "began to relax state central planning and focus on building local districts into...