Untying Thailand

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The implications of an uncertain ceasefire in Indochina and the possible beginning of separate political dialogues in Laos and Cambodia have again focused attention on Washington's alliance with Thailand, the only nation on the mainland of Southeast Asia which the United States is bound by treaty to defend. Significantly too, Thailand faces an increasingly serious, if not yet critical, insurgency. No matter how the situation in each of the three Indochina states is finally resolved, President Nixon's decisions on Thailand in the next year will largely determine the future course of American policy and involvement in Southeast Asia during the decade ahead.

Since the end of World War II, a series of American administrations has operated on the principle that an anti-Communist Thailand, friendly to Washington, was an asset, if not a necessity, to the strategic and economic interests of the United States in Asia. This principle was converted into a mutual defense treaty in the SEATO pact of 1954, and in 1962, as a result of the Laotian crisis of that year, this commitment was enlarged by interpretation in the Rusk-Thanat accord, so that the United States agreed to defend Thailand unilaterally if SEATO collectively should fail to heed a Thai call for assistance...