Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia

Wen-Qing Ngoei

Format: Print Book

ISBN: 9789814843324

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Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from WWII through the end of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new history premised on sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation. He argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with local antipathy toward China to usher the region from European colonialism to U.S. hegemony. Central to this assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might, as well as less overt cultural influences based in decades of colonial rule. Also essential to the analysis is the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors.

Ngoei shows how the pro-U.S. trajectory after the Pacific War was characteristic of the wider region’s history. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations—Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia—had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China. In the process, the colonial order passed into a condition of U.S. hegemony. Arc of Containment demonstrates that U.S. failure in Vietnam had fewer long-term consequences than widely believed, because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier.

Format: PB

Number of Pages: 254

Publication Date: 08/04/2019

Imprint: Cornell University Press / ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute