It may be in the realm of conspiracy theory still, but some would contend that the CIA installed the Lon Nol government and helped oust Norodom Sihanouk as king. Sihanouk himself wrote a book called "My War with the CIA" and as I understand it (haven't read it) his position is that this happened in retaliation for Cambodia remaining neutral in the Vietnam war.
I'm not sure to what extent this is true, or whether or not Sihanouk quietly supported the VC, but Cambodia was absolutely devastated by US bombing and it can only be described as evil. As a personal anecdote, I recently met some Cambodian men who subsisted as children by salvaging unexploded American bombs.
Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives -- more than the Allies dropped in the entirety of World War II -- on Cambodia, whose population was then smaller than New York City's. Estimates of the number of people killed begin in the low hundreds of thousands and range up from there, but the truth is that no one has any idea.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/wha...
Note that the US didn't bomb Cambodia until quite late in the war. That probably helped the North Vietnamese more than anything.
Never heard of this but it no doubt pales in comparison to Vietnam's "remove them with a land army" commitment.
I just don't recall it going the way you described with instead them splitting up with one side backing communist imperialists and the other capitalist imperialists. They fell for the games plenty enough but resisted a lot, too.
Any way you look at it Ho Chi Minh was brilliant military tactician and strategist who drew from both ancient Chinese and modern western military philosophy to lead his people to independence. I'd argue that the use of socialism was probably not as significant (versus other options of wartime economies) as commonly thought. It was useful, however, to get diplomatic support and military hardware from allies such as Russia and China. I don't think it greatly shaped Vietnam, which is now very capitalist, just like China and Singapore, two other nominally 'communist' party-led modern Asian nations.
Not unlike WW2 for the Soviets.
>> Never heard of this
It's true right up until the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. Then US diplomats and officials were evacuated in helicopters, while the city was left for slaughter.
The one with most potential is probably Singapore given what they've accomplished in a short time. They just need a cultural shift to get them out of this conformist, nationalist, factory-worker mentality. They could become a hub of not only trustworthy business in Asia but innovation or quality-focused business too. The reactionaries are doing everything they can to prevent that, though, as it will threaten their power.