ABSTRACT
In the years immediately following the end of the Vietnam War, the USSR and the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam moved into a far more intimate relationship than had ever existed before. Moscow has seized what it regards as a great political and diplomatic opportunity in a region from which previously it had largely been excluded. Vietnam inadvertently blundered into regional alienation, which threw it into the arms of the USSR and a dependence that economic troubles have steadily deepened. The original postwar association lasted for the remainder of the decade and was replaced in the 1980s by a vastly altered relationship. Moscow's postwar moves in Indochina have been intended to serve general strategic objectives. Hanoi's enunciated foreign policy, after the end of the Vietnam War, was one of "independence"—meaning it intended to identify itself chiefly with the Third World. Within the socialist world, it would maintain a position of equidistance.
