The Vietnam war and the regional context

• Main Author: NGOEI, Wen-Qing
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2025
• Subjects: Vietnam War; Southeast Asia; US empire; colonialism; decolonisation; Cold War; China; anticommunism; communism; American Studies; History; International Relations
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3904; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5162/viewcontent/WQ_NGOEI_VietnamWar_RegionalContext_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.