DURING 1979, the tormented country of Kampuchea assumed an international political significance of a kind once associated with Vietnam. Conflict between the Communist parties and governments of Kampuchea and Vietnam served to engender a wider struggle engaging the interests of major external states over the appropriate and acceptable pattern of power in Indochina. The conflict over the internal political identity of Kampuchiea and the nature of its external affiliations. became more than a matter of the competing wills and capabilities of the Kampuchean and Vietnamese Communist movements. It becamecentral to the competing interests of China and the Soviet Union whose governments committed resources and prestige to the cause of their respective clients. In addition, Thailand and its fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as the United States were incorporated into an alignment opposed to the consolidation of Vietnamese power throughout the whole of Indochina. By the end of 1978, the relationship between the government of Kampuchea headed by Pol Pot and that of Vietnam had long passed the breaking point. The public justification of the former for its manifest hostility to the latter centered on the alleged persistence of the Vietnamese in seeking to subordinate the independence of Kampuchea within an Indochinese Federation. Irrespective of the precise political design of the Vietnamese Politburo, its Kampuchean counterpart had refused adamantly to accept the idea of a special relationship that, it wasmaintained in Hanoi, bound together the three peoples of Indochina. Vietnamese tolerance of the obdurate expression of Kampuchean independence-in particular cross-border shelling and bestial punitive raids -as well as the close ties between Phnom Penh and Beijing, which was regarded as a pernicious collusion, gave way to a determination to assert