That conflict also dovetailed with a civil war in Laos.

Beginning in the late 1940s, early 1950s, the Pathet Lao, the Communists, were drawing most of their young leaders from students studying in Hanoi — like the most famous president, Kaysone Phomvihane — and after the 1954 conflict at Dien Bien Phu, where France lost and agreed to independence for their Indochinese holdings. So the Pathet Lao held these two provinces in the northeast along Vietnam: Houaphan and Phongsaly. These were the Pathet Lao provinces, and then you had the royalists, the U.S.-backed government, holding the Mekong Valley and other provinces. From there, the Pathet Lao, backed by the Vietnamese Communists, basically sought to move Laos into a Communist sphere of influence.

What does President Obama’s coming visit mean for Laos?

For the government, I think it’s an important visit. My interpretation is that the Lao government also wants to maintain close connections with Western countries. There seems to be some evidence that the recent party congress in January 2016 represented a bit of a shift away from closer connections with China and back towards Vietnam.

I’d be cautious of oversimplifying that; I think Laos in fact tries to maintain connections with all of the different powers, so Laos would have a complex approach to those questions, not simply pivoting from one to the other in an either-or fashion. But part of that is Laos also tries to maintain close connections with countries like Japan, which is still the largest donor in the country, and with Western countries. So in that sense I think Laos would be interested in what a U.S. role in Southeast Asia could look like.

It’s a little bit interesting compared to Cambodia, which is seen as being much more closely connected to China. It’s evident in Cambodia’s approach to the South China Sea, where they’ve really been the most belligerent state in terms of blocking resolutions from Asean on the South China Sea. Laos is in a difficult position on this issue — clearly they can’t afford to completely alienate China, but they’re taking a bit of a different approach than Cambodia, is my sense. Laos is still trying to argue for resolutions coming out of Asean on the South China Sea, even if they might be very watered-down resolutions.

The Vietnam War — the bombing, specifically — took a huge toll on Laos, and leftover bombs are still killing people in the Laotian countryside. How might Obama’s presence in the country, or whatever he might say there, affect that issue of unexploded ordnance, or UXO?

It might be a bit less what he says and more the increased amount of aid that could go into UXO removal. It is still a pretty significant issue in many areas of the countryside. In the places where I work and do fieldwork, there are some companies that are doing UXO clearance. But there’s still a huge amount of land area affected by this, so I think increased U.S. support for UXO clearance would also be quite welcome.