Shifting Into the Lotus Position

When the new U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, Charles Whitehouse, arrived in Bangkok last week, something less than a red-carpet welcome awaited him. Student radicals had festooned the airport with banners reading BASTARD FORD, GET YOUR TROOPS OUT! and FORD, YOU DESTROY INTERNATIONAL LAW. Thai government officials denounced the Pentagon's dispatch of Marines and helicopters from the U.S.-operated Utapao airbase to the rescue of the American merchant vessel Mayaguez as "madness"; Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj reacted with what he first described as "displeasure" and later as outright "fury." At week's end an emergency Cabinet meeting voted to recall Whitehouse's counterpart, the Thai Ambassador to the U.S., from Washington for consultation.

Such anger from Bangkok--one of Washington's best friends in Asia since the end of World War II--underscores the extent to which the Thais have been stunned by the fall of the non-Communist governments in Cambodia and South Viet Nam and the current turbulence in Laos. Thailand sent soldiers to fight in South Viet Nam, and 25,000 U.S. servicemen and 350 American military aircraft are still based on Thai soil. But the Thais, who share 1,000 miles of common border with Laos and Cambodia, have suddenly found themselves surrounded by hostile forces. Accordingly, they are moving swiftly toward a neutralist stance in keeping with the new realities of power in Southeast Asia.

Soothing Spirit. For centuries the Siamese survived and prospered by shrewdly gauging such realities and then bending to the prevailing wind. They alone escaped the French and British colonization that engulfed the countries of the region. Modern Thailand, as a U.S. official put it, "has assumed the lotus position in regard to its neighbors; it doesn't want any of them to mistake its peaceful intentions." In that soothing spirit, Bangkok has moved quickly to accommodate recent shifts in the wind.

A delegation from Saigon has arrived to take over the South Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok, and the Thai Foreign Ministry has said that it will restaff its embassy in Saigon as soon as Tan Son Nhut airport is reopened to international flights. More surprising, Bangkok announced that it was establishing full diplomatic relations with North Korea. When South Korea protested and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos sent a special envoy urging Thailand to "rethink its move," Foreign Minister Chartichai Choonhavan had a blunt reply: "We have already rethought it." Thailand also announced that it would enter into a cultural and technological agreement with the Soviet Union.

The establishment of relations with China could come before the end of the year, even though Bangkok still has ties with Taipei. So far, however, Thailand's overtures to Hanoi have not been particularly well received.

U.S. Presence. Perhaps significantly, neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese have said flatly that the Thais must expel the U.S. military as a precondition to formal relations. Nonetheless, the U.S. military presence has been at the heart of the Thais' dilemma--particularly since student riots in 1973 toppled a fairly rigid military junta and replaced it with a multiparty system. Last March the newly elected government of Premier Seni Pramoj, 70, announced that it would ask the U.S. to withdraw its forces within 18 months. When Seni, whose government lasted only eight days, was replaced by his younger brother Kukrit,* the new Prime Minister quickly yielded to pressure from the socialists in the crazy-quilt Thai National Assembly, whose ranks include 22 parties, and cut the deadline to one year. Recently the U.S. agreed to remove 7,500 of its troops by the end of June and the rest presumably by next spring. But even that accelerated timetable may be speeded up.

Another point of friction between Bangkok and Washington centered on some 200 planes flown to Thailand by escaping South Vietnamese pilots as Saigon was falling. At first the Thais announced that they would turn the planes over to the new government in Saigon if asked to do so. But the U.S. insisted that it owned the planes and quickly removed more than 100 of the most valuable ones from Utapao. The angriest dispute of all centered on the arrival of 1,100 U.S. Marines at Utapao. Yet, even as Kukrit was warning the U.S. of "serious and drastic consequences" unless the Marines departed, a Royal Thai Navy task force was sailing toward the waters off the Thai-Cambodian border; the Khmer Rouge had threatened to use force to move the border one kilometer back into Thai territory, and Bangkok responded by authorizing its navy to "take the necessary steps including artillery bombardment" in case the Cambodians should make such a move. Moreover, the lightning U.S. strike rescued five Thais from Cambodian captivity.

One of the principal reasons for Thailand's nervousness is that for ten years it has had a Communist insurgency of its own. The 7,000 to 10,000 rebels of the Thai People's Liberated Armed Forces, armed and trained by the North Vietnamese and Chinese, do not constitute an immediate threat to Thailand's 41 million people. But they are fairly active in the poverty-stricken northeast region opposite Laos and along the northern Mekong River frontier. The government reasons that if it ceases to provide shelter for American bombers, North Viet Nam might be encouraged to ease up in its support of the Thai insurgents.

In Bangkok, which still bustles with Western tourists, the signs of unease are growing. Passport applications have suddenly doubled to about 700 per day. The price of gold is soaring, and the once stable baht has started to slide. "Now when you get together with your Thai friends," says an American resident, "they ask you about real estate prices in California." As former Premier Seni Pramoj noted, "You cannot say, 'Look, I'm a capitalist,' when you are surrounded by Communists. They'll do you in!"

Popular Monarch. Despite their current worries, however, the Thais have many built-in strengths to fall back on--including their ancient tradition of independence and their long-nurtured fear of the Vietnamese, with whom they have warred for centuries. They also have an immensely popular monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 47, a tireless worker who spends much of his time traveling in rural Thailand with a walkie-talkie in his hip pocket. In addition, the country has remained stubbornly prosperous, with sharply rising foreign exchange and gold reserves--a fact that has undoubtedly inhibited the growth of the Communist insurgency.

*A newspaper publisher and columnist, Kukrit, 66, played the role of an Asian Premier in the 1963 movie The Ugly American.

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