Les grandes puissances et le Laos, 1954–1964 (review)

It is difficult nowadays to imagine how important Laos once was in the deliberations of the great powers. When Dwight Eisenhower handed the U.S. presidency over to John Kennedy, he warned that this newly independent, impoverished state of just three million people was potentially the most dangerous flashpoint of the Cold War in Asia.

Laurent Cesari’s extensively researched and carefully argued study covers the period from the 1954 Geneva agreements, which brought the First Indochina War to an end, through the formation and breakdown of the first coalition government in Laos and the tortuous negotiations leading up to the 1962 Geneva conference on Lao neutrality, and on to the subsequent collapse of the second coalition government as Laos was inevitably drawn into the Second Indochina War. Over the following decade Laos had the dubious distinction of becoming the most heavily bombed country, per head of population, in the history of warfare.

The core of the story Cesari tells is covered in the five (out of eight) chapters devoted to the period from the collapse of the first Lao coalition government to the outcome of the 1962 Geneva agreement. The primary focus is on the shift in U.S. policy from opposition to Lao neutrality to grudging support of it. Four factors swayed U.S. policymakers. Least influential were the views of its principal allies in the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), Britain and France, which both preferred the neutrality option. Britain wanted to avoid war with China, which British leaders feared would lead to nuclear escalation. France preferred neutrality because Charles de Gaulle was convinced that military victory in Indochina would prove impossible.

The second factor was the situation on the ground in Laos, where General Phoumi Nosavan, the military strongman favored by the United States, proved to be a weak reed, and the Royal Lao army no match for the combined Neutralist and Pathet Lao forces. The only effective opposition came from the Hmong “secret army,” which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was then busily recruiting. So a political solution was the only alternative, though it took time for this to sink in—and longer still for the U.S. government to overcome its suspicion of the Neutralist leader, Prince Souvanna Phouma, the only acceptable candidate for prime minister in a new coalition government.

Both these factors have been noted in previous accounts. So, too, has the third, the regional equation; in particular, how what happened in Laos would be likely to affect the situation in South Vietnam. But Cesari sheds fresh light on the debate at the highest levels in Washington about whether to commit U.S. ground forces in Laos and whether to divide the country in two at the seventeenth parallel. Both options were seriously considered but rejected on the grounds that the expansion of Communism could be better contained in Vietnam, where both terrain and allies were thought to offer better prospects of success.

The fourth factor was international. Laos was a bargaining chip in the global contest for advantage between the United States and the USSR—in particular, as Cesari shows, in negotiations over Berlin. U.S. officials made support for Lao neutrality a quid pro quo for agreement on a German settlement, but they expected that the Soviet Union would enforce Laos’s neutrality. This expectation presupposed that the USSR wielded as much influence over the Chinese and North Vietnamese as it did over the East European states, something that was simply not true. In any case, interests did not sufficiently coincide. For the United States, Indochina formed part of its strategy to contain China, whereas for Moscow it was an arena for Sino-Soviet competition.

U.S. expectations of what neutralization would achieve also proved a miscalculation. Kennedy wanted “a Laos anti-communist but truly neutral” (p. 176). But this was a contradiction in terms. Souvanna Phouma was a scion of the royal house of Luang Prabang, which at one time had...