Word: viets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Latin America's history is filled with government reversals, but rarely at the ballot box. Coups, revolutions and invasions -- often organized by Washington -- are more common means. Ever since the trauma of Viet Nam, the U.S. has sought a less direct and costly method to have its way. Where military force could still do the trick cost effectively, the U.S. was willing to use it, as in Grenada and Panama. But in Nicaragua, wittingly or not, Washington stumbled on an arm's-length policy: wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow...
That bedrock contention of the cold war simply does not stand up these days. Insofar as the Kremlin still calls the tune, it is sounding retreat. In the past year the U.S.S.R. has removed its army from Afghanistan, prevailed on Viet Nam to withdraw its troops from Cambodia, and helped begin extricating the Cubans from Angola...
...Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov asked, "Suppose the bases go tomorrow -- where's the threat?" The Soviets, he insisted, "will not fill the vacuum." American planners are not so sure of that. Subic is strategically situated across the China Sea from Cam Ranh Bay, the former U.S. naval base in Viet Nam, which now berths about 20 Soviet warships...
...Viet Nam. Nowhere, perhaps, has the Soviet Union more emphatically demonstrated a determination to put a kinder, gentler face on its foreign policy than in Viet Nam. Last September, under pressure from Moscow, Viet Nam withdrew most of its remaining 26,000 troops from Cambodia (though last week there were reports that several thousand Vietnamese troops and military advisers have since returned). The Soviet Union has also begun reducing its muscle at the former U.S. military and supply base at Cam Ranh Bay. Two weeks ago, the Soviet Foreign Ministry announced that Moscow was removing...
...Party Secretary-General Nguyen Van Linh has reduced its armed forces by 500,000 troops over the past two years. Economic reforms begun in 1987 have included devaluing the currency, slashing subsidies for state enterprises and permitting a free market to blossom. The results have been encouraging. Last year Viet Nam exported more than 1 million tons of rice, the largest shipment in decades. But a U.S. trade embargo remains intact, and Viet Nam's Soviet and East European trading partners are looking elsewhere for hard-currency deals. Hence Viet Nam, which owes Moscow $16 billion, is desperately courting foreign...