Word: viet
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Already, Friendship Pass, across which Mao fed Ho Chi Minn's war against South Viet Nam and the U.S., has been stitched closed by the Chinese with barbed wire. Other routes are seeded with land mines or pocked with foxholes. A day seldom passes without Peking and Hanoi each blaming the other for a new string of incidents...
...Viet Nam's motives for twisting the dragon's tail are much less clear. Hanoi might have convinced itself that even a limited Chinese thrust into Viet Nam would bring swift retaliation by some of the Soviet forces arrayed along China's western and northern frontiers. But as for why such tail twisting should now be so popular in Hanoi, some Western observers can only speculate that it is a sign that a group of hard-lining expansionists, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap and Army Chief of Staff Van Tien Dung, are gaining supremacy...
Ironically, Hanoi's muscle flexing all over Indochina threatens to weaken further Viet Nam's already seriously strained resources. In addition to the 130,000 troops Hanoi has sent into Cambodia, it has 30,000 in Laos; because 160,000 skilled Laotians have fled the country, Hanoi's troops now have to help run the nation. Meanwhile, Viet Nam's own economy is collapsing. Exports have dropped sharply, and food production is way down; last year the grain crop was a record 4.3 million tons below what was needed to feed Viet...
Inevitably, Viet Nam's woes will increase Hanoi's dependence on Moscow, to which the regime already owes $6 billion. "Through ambition, ineptitude and, one suspects, plain stupidity," says Patrick J. Honey, a longtime Viet Nam analyst at the University of London, "the Vietnamese Communist leaders have brought their own country to the brink of famine and economic ruin. They have provided a foothold for the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia, jeopardized Viet Nam's own national independence and brought the possibility of large-scale conflict to the region once more." As this week began, that possibility...
From Bangkok to Bangor, investors are buying up gold−and paying record prices for it. Scarcely a week goes by without a fresh blast of bad news to push up the value of the mystic metal that thrives on crisis. Viet Nam's invasion of Cambodia, which began late in December, was one such event, but gold's biggest boost lately has been the winter-long turmoil in Iran. As investors have grown fearful of another energy crunch, the price has surged from under $200 per oz. in mid-autumn to a record $254 two weeks...