[Vietnamization] "the policy of slowly eating silkworms"

BROTHER ENEMY

by Nayan Chanda

Vietnamese settlers started to establish villages in forested Cambodian territory... An eighteenth-century Vietnamese general described this tactic of slow territorial absorption of Cambodia under the pretext of supporting the Khmer throne as "the policy of slowly eating silkworms." 

...the Vietnamese embarked on a process that, unchecked, might well have led to the disappearance of Cambodia altogether.