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Likely to fall would be Burma, given its 1,370-mile frontier with Red China. Dictator Ne Win is plunging his country headlong into instant socialism, further dislocating a society racked by civil strife. In his two years in power, Ne Win has nationalized all banks, taken 70% of trade out of private hands. Two weeks ago, soldiers in battle dress invaded and seized more than 3,000 wholesale stores in Rangoon. Meanwhile, upwards of 2,500 political prisoners are behind bars—paradoxically including many Communists. Half a dozen insurgent guerrilla bands, two of them Communist, roam the hinterlands.
With the Indo-Chinese peninsula and Burma gone, the pressure southward would become increasingly hard to resist. The healthy, vigorous and anti-Communist Malaysian Federation, already under attack by Indonesia, would probably have to fight for its life. Indonesia itself would draw ever closer to the Communist camp. The Philippines would probably hold out but would be severely menaced.
What motivates Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk is the fear and expectation that all this may happen in the foreseeable future. Moreover, Sihanouk is almost pathologically afraid that Cambodia's neighbors, who destroyed the Khmer Empire and have encroached on Cambodian territory ever since, will crush his country completely unless he can make a deal with the most powerful nation in the area—Red China. He may have read André Malraux's The Royal Way, in which one character remarks: "Don't forget that the Khmer temples were built without cement. Like castles made of dominoes."
Zigzag Diplomacy. Sihanouk has executed such a dizzying series of flip-flops in the cold war that he is getting to be known as the man who would rather switch than fight.
In 1956 he rejected the protection of SEATO and seemingly pulled away from the U.S. In the next couple of years, he denounced Communism and described U.S. aid as indispensable to keep Cambodia from falling to the Reds. In 1958 he recognized Red China, and ever since then he has continued to move in a zigzag pattern—or "sawtooth," as he himself frankly calls it.
But the overall direction has been ever closer to Red China. In one of his latest visits to Peking, the Prince was feted at every turn and was greatly impressed by the sheer mass of humanity he saw. "They never end," he said. "The people never end."
He was shaken by the overthrow of President Diem's regime in South Viet Nam last fall, convinced that it was engineered by the U.S. He decided that a similar fate might befall him if he leaned on the U.S. too much. Abruptly he told Washington to stop aid—later typically complaining that U.S. officials had acted on his request too hastily. He recalled his ambassador to Washington, renewed old charges that the CIA was behind a clandestine radio operated by his domestic opposition. He was also still convinced that when he received a "present" from an unknown donor in 1959 and the box turned out to contain a bomb, the CIA was to blame.