Word: buffers
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Such neutrality might be hard to maintain. And a neutral Laos serving as a buffer state between Communism and the free world is not the tidiest of solutions. But then, few things in Laos are (see following story...
...Cambodia, Laos is the buffer that permits it a capricious neutralism. To firmly anti-Communist Thailand on the west, Laos is a geographic and ethnic neighbor and, if the Communists should take it over, a potential threat. To the U.S., Laos is primarily something to deny to the Communists, and just about as inconvenient a testing ground as can be found...
...north not as the Communist but as "the Annamese problem." About 1700, Laos split into three kingdoms, run by rival royalty, and it was still split two centuries later when the French, the last and by all odds the gentlest of the conquerors, arrived in 1893, seeking a buffer state against Siam and British Burma. The French looked around and proclaimed Laos living proof of Rousseau's theories about the noble savage...
...three times to get things done. On his telephone, the President has installed a console of pushbuttons, enabling him to bypass secretaries and instantly reach the inner offices of his top lieutenants. In the same spirit of crowflight communications, Kennedy last week abolished the Operations Coordinating Board, a buffer agency between the White House and national security agencies, and explained that he preferred "direct communications with the responsible agencies so that everyone will know what I have decided...
...Pentagon, whose planners found the prospects dismaying. With no seaport, jet airfields or railroad, with only 500 miles of all-weather roads (the main road between Vientiane and the outside world runs along the Mekong, is under water six months of the year), backward Laos is an ideal buffer zone but a terrible battleground...