Distant Connections

The four years of the Carter administration saw both the United States and the Soviet Union fully engaged in intense efforts at what might be termed from the strategist's point of view geopolitical position building. Triggered by an imminent shift in the strategic weapons balance, position building occurred across the entire landscape in both the eastern and western hemispheres and was accompanied by military conflicts as the process reached flashpoints in Central America, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa. This essay will focus on two of these areas, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on the interrelationship of events in early 1979 when the position-building process reached a point of intensity and there occurred virtually simultaneously the Sino-Vietnamese war, the VietnameseCambodian conflict, South Yemen's attack on North Yemen, the culmination of the Camp David peace treaty, the fall of the Shah in Iran, and the early stages of the crisis in Nicaragua

Administration (probate law · Ancient history · Economy · French horn · Geography · Geopolitics · Middle East · Political science · Politics · Position (finance · Sociology · Strategist · Treaty · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies