Publication Type
Book Chapter
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
1-2025
Abstract
This chapter traces Southeast Asia’s overall pro-U.S. trajectory from before and through the American war in Vietnam, a process in which the region’s anticommunist nationalists collaborated with the United States and Britain to gain, and remain in, power. Between the late 1940s through the early 1960s, indigenous anticommunist elites in Thailand and the Philippines rose to political dominance with U.S. assistance; in Malaya and Singapore they did so with British support. The United States and Britain, with their Malayan and Singaporean allies, would influence developments within Indonesia that precipitated the Indonesian Army’s rightwing coup of 1965, a transformative event that led to the eradication of the Indonesian Communist Party. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam deepened, the authoritarian regimes of these five anticommunist Southeast Asian states pursued increasingly intimate political, military and economic links with America and each other. And though U.S. leaders despaired over their efforts in Vietnam, they persisted in a broader regional strategy, supporting their regional allies’ rightward tendencies, and forging a geostrategic arc of anticommunist states that effectively encircled Vietnam and China, as well as frustrated Soviet ambitions in Southeast Asia. U.S. failures in Vietnam would be something of an anomaly in the wider regional context.
Keywords
Vietnam War, Southeast Asia, US empire, colonialism, decolonisation, Cold War, China, anticommunism, communism
Discipline
American Studies | History | International Relations
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, Vol. 3
Volume
3
Editor
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen & Pierre Asselin
ISBN
9781316225288
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
City or Country
Cambridge
Citation
NGOEI, Wen-Qing. (2025). The Vietnam war and the regional context. In Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, Vol. 3 (pp. ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3904
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.