The Forgotten Conflict: Communist Infighting And The Third Indochina War

De: Vu Manh Dung

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The fall of Saigon in 1975 did not bring peace to Southeast Asia; it merely set the stage for a new and brutal conflict. This Third Indochina War was not a fight against Western powers, but a shocking conventional war between the region's victorious communist states. It was a conflict fueled by ancient nationalist hatreds, genocidal ideology, and the bitter Sino-Soviet split.

This book details the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, a swift blitzkrieg launched on Christmas Day 1978 to topple the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. In response, China, the Khmer Rouge's powerful patron, unleashed a massive punitive invasion of northern Vietnam to teach Hanoi a lesson. These two invasions spiraled into a decade-long quagmire, trapping the Vietnamese army in a two-front war.

The war settled into a grinding insurgency, with the Khmer Rouge waging a guerrilla campaign from sanctuaries in Thailand, backed by a cynical coalition of China and the United States. This book explores the diplomatic war at the United Nations, the brutal, decade-long border conflict between China and Vietnam, and the clashes that spilled over onto Thai soil. It traces the conflict from the killing fields of Cambodia to the high-stakes political maneuvering in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.

The war was not won on the battlefield, but was instead bankrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Vietnam's own economic reforms. This history covers the full arc of the conflict, from the fall of Pol Pot to the 1991 Paris Peace Accords that finally established a UN-led path to peace. It concludes with the final, pragmatic normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam, closing the last painful chapter of the 20th century's wars in Indochina.