The area ASEAN covered had some strategic significance, however, not only for the energy sources and raw materials it contained, but for its importance as a waterway. Among the hundred or so ships that were passing through the Malacca Strait daily in the early 1980s were those that carried the bulk of Japan's imports of oil and iron ore. For the United States and for the Soviet Union the waterway was important as the passage between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Access to trade with the region and the preservation of stability to enable this to continue seemed to offer a common interest to all the powers, and the Soviet Union in particular was at pains in the later 1970s to woo the ASEAN states — after initially being ill-disposed to recognize the organization — and to seek closer links. For a time Moscow touted a proposal for an Asian Collective Security Pact, but since this was transparently aimed at opposing China it found no takers in an area conscious that it had to find some way of getting along with that huge and unpredictable country. Yet the Soviet Union was also determined to support Vietnam and the two policies were not compatible.
ASEAN drew away from the Soviet Union, sharply so after the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea, and some of its members began to forge closer links with China. The Soviet Union became isolated in Asia, its only allies being Vietnam and a North Korea that was careful to maintain links with China as well. Soviet forces did, however, reap the benefit of the support for Hanoi, in the form of air and naval bases in Vietnam. The Soviet navy began to make use of Cam Ranh Bay in particular, admirably placed halfway between the Far East Fleet and the Soviet naval force in the Indian Ocean, and affording surveillance over the activities of the US Seventh Fleet in the south Pacific.
It was almost inevitable that ASEAN would, under the new circumstances that were unfolding, pay more attention to security concerns. By 1980 the military expenditures of the member states had risen to $5.47 billion, 45 per cent more than the year before and a near doubling compared with 1975. Thailand, dangerously close to Vietnamese military activity in Kampuchea, was already devoting 20 per cent of its budget to military purposes. All were buying modern weapons, with Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand acquiring new tanks, indicating a readiness to resist any incursions by Vietnam. An interesting feature was the growing adoption of American weapons. All the countries operated one model or another of the F-5 Tiger fighter and the A-4 Skyhawk fighter-bomber. The US M-16 assault rifle was the standardized personal arm. American military advisers were in many countries, and ASEAN officers trained in hundreds in the United States. American military aid to ASEAN members went up by 250 per cent to some $7.5 million in the five years up to 1980 and was to more than double in the four years after that.
There were military links with other countries too. Indonesia, as an island chain, concentrated largely on sea and air forces, buying in 1980 three missile corvettes from the Netherlands, four missile ships from South Korea and two submarines from West Germany, together with fighter aircraft from Britain as well as from the United States. Malaysia bought frigates from Germany and mine counter-measures vessels from Italy. Military facilities were expanded too, notably in Malaysia. A new air base was built in Kelantan state, facing the Gulf of Siam, which became operative in 1983. A new naval port was also built in Perak state on the Strait of Malacca, which opened in 1984.
So ASEAN military strength grew with the heightened awareness of the need for it, and with this the transformation towards a military grouping slowly developed. Staff talks, with shared exercises and intelligence, paved the way militarily. Thailand, most threatened, and Singapore, most conservative and realistic, led the way politically, with Malaysia coming along more slowly. Indonesia had a special reluctance to draw nearer to China, remembering past Chinese involvement in the activities of the Indonesian Communist Party — which were, it must be said, brutally put down. But no country was quite sure about Chinese aims; after all, Peking would not renounce support for communist elements in South-East Asia despite its wish to be on good terms with governments. As an overtly communist state aspiring to the leadership of the Third World, perhaps such a renunciation was simply not thinkable to the ideologically pure in Peking, even if their more pragmatic colleagues saw that other things were much more important for the time being.
By early 1985, ASEAN, after feeling its way for some time, had become a reluctant but none the less real military alliance. The struggle in Indochina had in the meantime been continuing, with various insurgent factions managing to survive, even to prosper, on the strength of arms and other help reaching them from China via Thailand. Vietnam had something like 250,000 men tied down by Kampuchean guerrillas and more men were occupied trying to maintain control of Laos, where again China was giving active help. There were constant clashes with Chinese troops along the common border, which suited Peking very well since it locked up large numbers of the best Vietnamese troops and prevented them from being used against the Kampucheans and Laotians.
In short, Vietnam was bogged down. The economic strain was huge and Moscow, angry at Hanoi's total unwillingness not only to listen to advice but even to accept that it might be needed, began to keep it on short supplies as a means of applying leverage. Military material was carefully rationed on one excuse or another; spare parts for the almost entirely Soviet-made equipment were limited and slow in arriving. The Soviet Union had become disenchanted with the lack of success of the South-East Asian venture and was alarmed at the way ASEAN had now banded itself together in open opposition. It is possible, just possible, that Soviet pressure might eventually have forced some compromise or change of course on Hanoi, on the hard-faced leadership there which had known no other life but that of armed struggle to attain its own ends. But war now broke out in Europe. Soviet supplies almost instantly dried up; Soviet forces left; the ships in Cam Ranh Bay scurried off. The whole political scene changed dramatically.
When war came to Europe, the nations in Asia were immediately fearful that it would come there too, for surely the conflict would spread around the world. American and Soviet warships both put to sea at once. Merchant vessels made for the nearest safe port. Defences everywhere went on the alert. Diplomats worked feverishly. Nobody knew quite what to expect. They simply feared the worst, as people will.
The Soviet Union faced the most difficult problems. Though Europe was the primary theatre, the vital one in which the war against the Western Alliance would be won or lost, the Soviet Union had to remain fully on guard in Asia too. There it was confronted by China, an implacable enemy whose military strength had steadily been improving. Chinese weapon systems and formations were no match for those of the Soviet forces but their numbers were huge. The Soviet Union, accustomed to using men in mass, found it profoundly disturbing to face vastly superior masses. The thinly populated Soviet Far Eastern territories were vulnerable to long-term Chinese expansionism and Moscow was not a little aware of the political and cultural appeal that China might exert, if things went badly for the Soviet Union, on the peoples of the Soviet Asian republics.
Soviet foreign policy in Asia had long been dominated by the need to contain China. Since 1969 strong forces had been built up along the 4,000-mile border, amounting to almost a quarter of the Red Army, around fifty divisions in all. They were there simply to defend the border, to prevent China from altering it by force (it was disputed in many places) and to see that if fighting did break out the Soviet Union would get the better of it. There was no intention of using them to mount an invasion of China: that would be to fight the way Peking wanted it. The Chinese would welcome the chance to draw an attacker deep into their often brutally inhospitable country and then wear him down with an inexhaustible supply of hardy defenders. That was not Moscow's idea at all.