The Laotian Crisis

Abstract

In the context of post-war Anglo-American relations over South East Asia it seems a remarkable irony that Britain came closer to intervening militarily alongside the United States in the comparatively insignificant state of Laos in 1961–2, rather than during the collapse of French Indo-China in 1954, or South Vietnam after 1965. One can equally well pose Khrushchev’s question to US Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson of British policy at this juncture: ‘why take risks over Laos?’¹ The Laotian crisis, which was the first to confront the new Kennedy Administration, in fact revealed much about the strengths and shortcomings of the Anglo-American alliance from the British perspective. On the one hand, Macmillan was eventually able, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to reinforce Kennedy’s own instincts against large-scale military involvement. On the other, Britain still came close to being sucked by hawks in the Pentagon and State Department into helping to fight an unwinnable war in Indo-China. One might observe here that Kennedy’s post-Bay of Pigs conversion to scepticism as regards the quality of advice he received from the CIA and military was most fortunate from the British point of view.