Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The final quarter of the twentieth century proved a substantially less tumultuous chapter in US–Asian relations than the quarter-century that preceded it. Between the end of World War II in 1945 and the conclusion of the Second Indochina War in 1975, much of South and Southeast Asia suffered from persistent warfare, wrenching, often bloody independence struggles, bitter ideological conflicts, debilitating economic dislocation, and incessant political turmoil. The United States, for its part, tended to filter all those developments through a Cold War lens. American strategists believed that the eventual pro-Western orientation of South and Southeast Asian nations could be instrumental to the achievement of overall Cold War goals and hence sought to calibrate US regional policies accordingly. Global priorities, in the event, invariably trumped more focused regional and bilateral perspectives in US policymaking. The post-1975 period, while hardly placid, brought much greater stability and a significant reduction in violence and outside intervention, especially to Southeast Asia. The regional cooperation and cohesion that has so markedly shaped Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five years has been paralleled by striking economic progress and political stability as well. Despite those achievements, and despite the strengthening commercial ties between the United States and Southeast ... log in or subscribe to read full text