Publication Date

2025

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Jones, Eric A.

Degree Name

Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)

Legacy Department

Department of History

Abstract

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Southeast Asia arrived at its most stable condition since the close of World War II. In Indochina, international communism triumphed over Western democracy. However, regional peace was fleeting and tenuous. Disparate communist ideologies and combustible, extra-regional power designs soon clashed. American retrenchment emboldened the Soviet Union and China, two competing communist forces, to fill the power vacuum and inflame the enmity unfolding between their respective client states: Vietnam and Cambodia. Mounting violence between the pair culminated in late 1978 when Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea, unleashing the Third Indochina War. The Vietnamese-Cambodian War, the deadliest conflagration within the multifront proxy war, proved the first significant stress test for the non-communist regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The conflict tested the mettle, cohesion, and utility of ASEAN unlike anything previously in its fledgling history. Indonesia, a founding member harboring the most considerable capability to uplift the purpose and pertinence of ASEAN due to its size, regional outlook, and non-aligned foreign policy, raised its international profile during the conflict via multi-pronged diplomacy. Under Indonesian President Suharto, three distinct entities maneuvered Indonesian diplomacy inside and outside ASEAN regionalism: the foreign ministry, the military, and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. While their methods occasionally clashed, their end goal to realize Southeast Asian autonomy and stability was mutual. Indonesian bilateral diplomacy toward Vietnam to accommodate Hanoi in regional peace negotiations spurred ASEAN to designate Jakarta as the Association’s mediator regarding Vietnam. Indonesia’s emphasis on a regional-centric approach and framework to resolving the Cambodian crisis elevated Indonesian statecraft and ASEAN’s conflict resolution capabilities. Thus, Indonesia and ASEAN’s labors in the regional political arena directly impacted the fruition of the 1991 Comprehensive Cambodian Peace Agreements.

Extent

566 pages

Language

en

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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