ABSTRACT
The wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China in 1978-1979 created shock-waves within the international system of states. Not only was this the first time that countries led by Communist parties had been at war with each other, but these wars also happened in the immediate aftermath of the Second Indochina War, during which the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian Communists had been allies fighting the United States. For many, the world seemed to have turned upside down. The certainties of the past – especially the question of who was allied to whom – seemed to evaporate alongside the hopes for stability and peace in Indochina. Those in the West who had supported the US intervention against Vietnamese Communism as a necessary containment of China were in for a particularly rude shock. “These wars exploded our world-view,” one of them said; “. . . they gave accepted truths a real beating.”1
