Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the Singapore state and perhaps the wisest Asian leader of his period, was vocal in his firm belief, maintained to this writing, that American intervention was indispensable to preserve the possibility of an independent Southeast Asia. The analysis of the consequences for the region of a Communist victory in Vietnam was largely correct. But by the time of America’s full-scale participation in Vietnam, Sino-Soviet unity no longer existed, having been in perceptible crisis throughout the 1960s. China, wracked by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution,
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