Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War (review)

Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. 315 pp. $49.50 (hardcover), $18.95 (softcover).

Like many veterans of the Indochina conflict, I returned to the United States with a great deal of emotional baggage and a belief that a world that can send people to the moon ought to be able to find a way to resolve international differences without slaughtering one another. Unlike most other veterans, I have had the great fortune of being able to spend much of the ensuing three decades searching for explanations and alternatives to such behavior--including the great honor of serving for two years as the first president of the U.S. Institute of Peace in the mid-1980s.

For several years I have cotaught an advanced interdisciplinary seminar at the University of Virginia on "New Thinking About War and Peace," which has focused special attention on what has become known as the "democratic peace" thesis. Among the most impressive work on this subject in recent years is that of my colleague, John Norton Moore, who has drawn heavily on the scholarship of Bruce Russett, R. J. Rummel, and others, and has added a second crucial element from deterrence theory (validated in part by the brilliant historical work of Donald Kagan) in proposing a far broader, new paradigm about government behavior and incentive structures. I was therefore eager to see how the Indochina conflict of 1978-1979 conformed to the Moore paradigm.

Because my first book, a 500-page study titled Vietnamese Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), was published long ago, I was all the more delighted to receive an invitation to review Stephen Morris's Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia. I am pleased to report that it is a truly superb piece of scholarship. Morris has done his homework well, his analysis is rigorous and persuasive, and he has presented his views in a tight and highly readable package. The volume is must reading for anyone who wishes to understand not only the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, but also the character of the Communist regimes that struggled for--and in April 1975 achieved--power in those two countries at the height of the Cold War.

As Morris observes, standard explanations of international politics suggest that this conflict should never have occurred. Realists and balance-of-power advocates predict that states will pursue their rational self-interest to achieve goals like wealth and power and that they will resort to force only when they perceive a clear benefit. Yet, in Indochina, Cambodia repeatedly initiated the use of force against a regime that had long been seen as its benefactor--and a regime of far superior military resources and experience. The resulting struggle is the only extended armed conflict between two Communist states.

Vietnam had a numerical superiority in ground forces of nearly nine to one (not to mention superior equipment, including nearly one thousand tanks and hundreds of combat aircraft) and a population advantage of more than seven to one, which was accentuated by the fact that most Cambodians were, as the author notes, "in a state of total physical and mental exhaustion as a result of hunger and disease" by 1978 (p. 103). The author argues persuasively that the paranoia characteristic of chiliastic regimes provides a good part of the explanation (p. 13). A substantial degree of racism on both sides was also clearly at play.

The "fanatical ideological zeal" (p. 59) of the Cambodian Communist leaders was evidenced by their decision--in the wake of U.S. congressional action in May 1973 outlawing the use of funds for combat operations in Indochina after mid-August 1973--to launch a major offensive against Phnom Penh in July. If the Khmer Rouge had waited a few more weeks, Morris notes, they would...