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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011

In overall foreign policy orientation, the South Vietnamese Government remains rigidly uncompromising in its anti-Communist stand and is generally content to follow US leadership on world issues, remaining consciously dependent on the US as its major source of assistance and protection and principal international sponsor. Government leaders continue to display largely an ambivalent attitude toward France, which they admire as a cultural font but still suspect of political intrigue in South Vietnam as well as in Laos and Cambodia. Other current features of South Vietnam's foreign relations are: a) the apparent reduction of confidence in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to provide limited collective security; b) increased dissatisfaction with tho failure of the International Control Commission (ICC) to take effective action on repeated strong South Vietnamese complaints of increased Communist subversion and external intervention; and c) the expansion of relations with non-Communist countries in the Far East in order actively to promote anti-Communism in the area and with countries in Africa, the Middle Past, end Latin America in order to counter DRV diplomatic efforts and provide additional support for the Diem government'ธ international position as the legitimate government of Vietnam.

Until recently, Diem and his close advisors have been extremely sensitive to urgent US recommendations, particularly those pertaining to Vietnam's relations with Cambodia and to such domestic issues as corruption and nepotism in government and political reforms. Diem, Nu, and some other leaders frequently expressed (usually privately) resentment at what they considered US attempts to dictate to them and to restrict their freedom of action at hone and abroad. At the same tine, they evidenced apprehension over the extent of US political support of their regime, particularly in view of growing criticism of their leadership in and outside official circles, unfavorable publicity of their regime in the Western press, and their apparent suspicion that the US sympathized with the abortive coup in November 1960, Moreover, their evaluation of US actions in Laos during the past year had led them to question the strategic objectives of the US in South Vietnam. In recent months, however, the leadership's apprehension over the extent of US support of the regime and over US defense commitments in South Vietnam has been allayed considerably by strong public US statements of support, Vice President Johnson's, visit, and increased US aid.

The government's most immediate source of anxiety is that the Communist inroads in neighboring Laos and Cambodia may result in a Communist encirclement of South Vietnam. South Vietnam's relations with Laos have generally been friendly, with South Vietnam coming to assume an almost avuncular air and undertaking to influence Lao policies in general and Rh