Abstract

Minority Report

Thailand is the Honduras of Southeast Asia-a country for sale. Over the past few decades, the main buyer of things in the country, and of the country itself, has been the United States. The entire nation seems to be geared to please Americans. During the author's stay the "civilian" government, which is in fact a monarchy underwritten by an army, agreed to act as host to one of Caspar Weinberger's strategic regional arms dumps. U.S. Foreign Service officer, Maurice Tanner, has lived in Thailand for more than a decade, speaks the language and is married to a Thai. He writes of the country's enormous good fortune in having missed out on direct U.S. military intervention: Back then the lugubrious exponents of domino theory were confounded by Thailand, where a crude Maoist-Communist insurgency has not so much been defeated as has given up.