Word: malacca
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...that served as the main U.S. Navy base in the Viet Nam War. Having rights to Cam Ranh would give the Soviets a dramatic new naval advantage and would pose a potential threat to Chinese and Western shipping lanes, especially Japan's petroleum lifeline through the Strait of Malacca. But with no overt Soviet moves by week's end, Western observers remained hopeful that Hanoi's independent-minded leaders would surely think twice before granting Moscow so strategic a foothold in Southeast Asia...
...marauding buccaneers who currently infest the sea-lanes of Southeast Asia. Piracy has become an all too real contemporary scourge for fishing and commerce across an expanse of ocean stretching from the Malay peninsula to the Philippines. Sumatran pirates constantly harass coastal freighters and fishermen in the Straits of Malacca. Privateers from Malaysia and Khmer Rouge hijackers from Cambodia prey on Vietnamese refugee boats drifting across the Gulf of Thailand. One Japanese cargo line considers southern Philippine waters so dangerous that it has ordered its ships bound for Indonesia to detour westward into the South China Sea. Pleasure boats headed...
...treaty commitments. By those more searching standards, several countries stand out as having great importance to the U.S.: Japan, preeminently; South Korea, whose independence is vital to Japanese security; the Philippines and Indonesia, which have vast resources; and Singapore and Malaysia, which together with Indonesia control the Strait of Malacca, the vital corridor for oil tankers traveling to Asia from the Middle East. Despite U.S. treaty commitments, Thailand and Taiwan are now viewed as being of less importance. No one writes them off, but then-political future is being weighed dispassionately. It would not hurt essential American interests...
...cutoff in oil to the West because of another Middle East war, an Arab oil embargo and a White House command to the U.S. military to lift the embargo. At this order, two massive U.S. strike groups would get under way. One would move through the Strait of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf. It would include carriers whose jets would secure air control, and ships carrying at least a division of Marines (15,000 men). The second force would include two brigades of the 82nd Airborne Division (7,600 men) now stationed at Fort Bragg...
...spill could not have come at a worse time or in a worse place. The Malacca Strait is a key short cut in the "lifeline" route followed by most supertankers on the long voyage from the Persian Gulf to Japan. Japanese officials had just completed a survey of ship traffic through the narrow, heavily traveled waterway. As the slick was spreading, they were meeting with authorities from the Strait nations to discuss the survey and consider new safety regulations for ship traffic. Now they fear that the oil spill may lead to new restrictions on supertankers in the Strait...