The Long Haggle: Review of Kenton Clymer, A Delicate Relationship: The United States and Burma/Myanmar since 1945

• Main Author: NGOEI, Wen-Qing (WEI Wenqing)
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Asian Studies; International and Area Studies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3220
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In 1999, Robert McMahon published The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II, which included a bibliographic essay on the literature concerned with the history of U.S. relations with Southeast Asia. Today, McMahon’s survey barely requires an update. Works about the Vietnam War remain, as McMahon’s essay observed, “dauntingly voluminous and tend to overwhelm virtually all other regional issues.” Consequently, studies of U.S.–Southeast Asia relations with a “broad, regional focus” are still as “surprisingly rare” as when McMahon penned his essay. Another result is the dearth of scholarship on the United States’ interactions with Southeast Asian states other than Vietnam. Indeed, McMahon judged the literature on U.S. relations with Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore to be “disappointingly slim.”1 Though a few books on American relations with Singapore and Malaysia have appeared since McMahon’s essay, the U.S.-Burma relationship languished without historians’ attention almost forty years after John Cady’s The United States and Burma (1976).2Kenton Clymer’s A Delicate Relationship: The United States and Burma/Myanmar since 1945 offers an important corrective. Burma is the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia and occupies an important geographical position between India and China. According to Clymer, U.S. policymakers of the early Cold War considered Burma “one of the two most threatened Southeast Asian countries (the other being Vietnam).” Yet as the book’s introduction rightly states, there is still “no comprehensive historical account of American relations with Burma.” Even Cady’s work remains more about Burma’s history than its interactions with the United States (pp. 1–2). In contrast, Clymer’s study draws on American, Australian, and British archives, as well as interviews he has conducted with American as well as Burmese diplomats, politicians, and activists.