The Two Hands Of Hanoi

For Viet Nam, friends and enemies are not what they were

Do not fear when your enemies criticize you. Beware when they applaud.

The ancient Vietnamese proverb, quoted by Deputy Foreign Minister Vo Dong Giang last week during a visit to Bangkok, had an odd ring. Viet Nam was courting its former enemies and criticizing its former comrades.

In past months, Giang and his diplomatic colleagues have undertaken a sophisticated policy that could be called "the two hands of Hanoi." On the one hand, they have waged war; on the other, they have mounted an intensive good-neighbor campaign. Ironically, the war is being waged against Communist neighbor and supposed ally Cambodia, while the peace offensive is aimed at Thailand and other members of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations).

On the war front last week, Vietnamese troops strengthened their hold over the Cambodian salient known, because of its shape, as the Parrot's Beak. Rolling across the border into the beak with captured American armor, artillery, air support*--and tactics--General Vo Nguyen Giap's 60,000-man force easily shattered Khmer Rouge defenders. Although Hanoi acknowledged that Cambodian forces had launched a broad counterattack into seven Vietnamese provinces, General Giap's forces were believed to be still in control of key border sectors and were securing their military victory through the formation of a provisional government composed of local Khmer sympathetic to Hanoi.

The war, in any case, was overshadowed last week by a diplomatic road show: a 20-man delegation led by smiling Foreign Minister Nguyen Buy Trinh has been visiting in Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. In the ASEAN capitals, Trinh called for "a new period for the development of relations, friendship, good neighborliness and long-term cooperation." Hanoi's game plan appeared to be twofold: to explain and justify its invasion of Cambodia and, in long-range terms, to loosen its bond to Moscow. The Vietnamese appreciate Soviet assistance, but they do not want a bear hug. Thus in the ASEAN capitals they were laying groundwork for negotiations on economic cooperation and establishing or expanding trade relations.

Thailand, under a new, less antagonistic regime, welcomed the visit. The jovial Vietnamese were received at Bangkok airport with lilac-scented garlands called puang malais and elegantly chauffeured about town in capitalistic Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. There was even a cocktail party for Trinh, to which delegations from foreign embassies were invited.

Hanoi's two-handed diplomacy has already achieved one significant and rewarding result. Peking, which originally backed Cambodia while Moscow supported Viet Nam, last week showed a new evenhandedness by publishing the communiques and claims of both sides in the Parrot's Beak confrontation. Despite an assertion in Washington by presidential National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski that the Viet Nam-Cambodia conflict was a "proxy war" between China and the Soviet Union, neither superpower had in fact taken a direct role in backing an ally and neither appeared eager to do so.

Hanoi, at least, was ready for mediation and, more than that, for a new, broad harmony between Communist and non-Communist nations. Some analysts worry that Viet Nam may yet rekindle Ho Chi Minh's old dream of a Communist peninsula under Viet Nam's domination. But Thai Foreign Minister Upad-it Pachariyangkun emerged from last week's Bangkok discussions with his Vietnamese guests considerably more optimistic. "They seem determined to reconstruct their economy and make life better for their people," he told TIME Correspondent David DeVoss. "They understand that peace and stability are prerequisites to that task." Such a position, to Upadit, indicates a triumph of economic necessity over political ideology.

* When South Viet Nam surrendered, Hanoi confiscated large stores of U.S. equipment, including more than 500 aircraft of all types, 600 tanks, about 470 helicopters, 1,200 armored personnel carriers and 1.6 million rifles.

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