Arc of Containment Wen-Qing Ngoei Published by Cornell University Press Ngoei, Wen-Qing. Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia. Cornell University Press, 2019. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/65138. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/65138 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Introduction Recovering the Regional Dimensions of U.S. Policy toward Southeast Asia The war in the Pacific was fi nally over. Now, the western powers— battered, licking their wounds— entered the colossal wreck of Japan’s Co- Prosperity Sphere to reclaim their Southeast Asian territories. Some of these campaigns went badly. France’s recolonization dream in Indochina, sustained almost en- tirely by U.S. aid, became a nightmare. The Viet Minh had the French reeling by early 1954. And just a week into that new year, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower met with senior officials of the National Security Council (NSC) to discuss France’s flagging military efforts. Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles was the first to speak. He informed Eisenhower that the French garrison was “locked up” at Dien Bien Phu, “surrounded by approximately three Viet Minh divisions” as “fresh Viet Minh battalions were en route.” Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought— wrongly, as it turned out—that the Viet Minh would “avoid an all-out assault on Dien Bien Phu.” Dulles was less sure. He believed that the Viet Minh might attack this French “fortress” and accept severe military losses if only to inflict “psychological damage” on the French “ will to continue” the war. As talk lurched toward how the United States might respond to the prospect of a French withdrawal, Eisenhower became agitated. Though none in the NSC dared say it, he could sense that they waited on his answer to one question above all: would he commit U.S. troops to Indochina? On rec ord, he declared “with great force” that he “could not imagine the United States putting ground troops anywhere in Southeast Asia, except possibly in Malaya.”1 2 Introduction At the time, Britain and its local allies in Malaya as well as Singapore were six years into counterinsurgency operations and politi cal campaigns against the mostly Chinese Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Like the Viet Minh, the MCP had been the backbone of a popu lar anti- Japanese re sis tance army in occupied Malaya during World War II. In 1948, MCP guerrillas launched an armed revolt against British authorities, attempting to leverage support from the hundreds and thousands of ethnic Chinese who constituted nearly 40 percent of Malaya’s population. In Singapore, affiliates of the MCP infiltrated workers’ unions and middle schools, mounting frequent labor strikes and student pro- tests that para lyzed the country. British leaders had named these troubles an “Emergency.” But Eisenhower considered them critical Cold War contests with wider regional ramifications. Throughout his first year in office, he had agonized over communist aggression in Malaya and Indochina. In his inaugural speech of 1953 and others that year, he held that Malaya was “indefensible” if Indochina went to the Viet Minh, that should Malaya fall, then Indonesia would also quickly succumb to communism. In April 1954, he envisioned the states of Southeast Asia as a row of dominoes, their fates all interconnected in the Cold War strug gle.2 Little wonder, then, that the Singapore domino also preoccupied Eisenhow- er’s officials. Singapore Island was host to Britain’s most impor tant naval and air installations in Asia and vital to the U.S.- led Southeast Asia Treaty Organ- ization (SEATO) military alliance. In March 1955, Kenneth Young of the State Department returned from Southeast Asia to report not only that Malaya would soon become a “Chinese state” but also that Singapore faced “real danger of communist subversion.” He explained: “80% of Singapore was Chinese” and more than half of them under the age of twenty- one— the communists had already made such “headway” in the country’s middle schools that in the com- ing years most of Singapore’s labor force would be “oriented toward and under the control of Peking.”3 Months later, U.S. strategists still grappling with Young’s assessment warned that in the interconnected region, losing Singa- pore ensured “the power of the West to influence events in Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam would be greatly reduced.”4 Recently declassified documents show, furthermore, that until 1959 NSC officials so feared an “internal takeover by the Communists or the extreme leftists” in Singapore that they resolved to “take all feasible measures to thwart the at- tempt, including even military action.”5 It did not come to this. Britain and Singapore’s anticommunist nationalists managed in the early 1960s to suppress the country’s socialist movement. Yet it was never a remote prospect given Introduction 3 Eisenhower’s track rec ord of covert maneuvers against the left- leaning gov- ernments of Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. These Cold War anx i eties explain why Eisenhower was relieved when Malayan and British efforts ultimately sent a tattered MCP fleeing north to the Malayan- Thai border in the late 1950s.6 He was cheered also that Britain had cultivated anticommunist Malayan nationalists who won popu lar legiti- macy at the ballot box in the mid-1950s, led their country to in de pen dence in 1957, and continued thereafter to align their nation with the West. In 1960, Eisenhower would hail the end of the Malayan Emergency as a “victory” against communism “in all its forms.”7 U.S. officials entertaining the possi- bility of Southeast Asia’s dominoes falling for the West sought to adapt Britain and Malaya’s example for the United States’ Cold War playbook. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations, too, invested high stakes in the smooth decolonization, stability, and avowed anticommunism of Malaya and Singapore.8 In 1962, Roger Hilsman, adviser to President John F. Kennedy, judged that the creation of Malaysia— the merger of Malaya, Singapore, and Britain’s Borneo territories scheduled for 1963— would complete a “wide anti- communist arc” that linked Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and the Philippines, encircling China and its Vietnam ese allies.9 Kennedy, with the entire region in view, soon acclaimed Malaysia as “the best hope for security in that very vital part of the world.”10 In September 1964, with President Lyndon Johnson poised to send U.S. troops to Vietnam, RAND Corporation delivered (per the State Department’s commission) five detailed studies of British- Malayan counterin- surgency and jungle warfare tactics.11 As U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia deepened, U.S. leaders clutched at those older hands, the British, from which world power was slipping, as if to seize some cache of imperial knowledge that might be brought to bear on the once heavi ly colonized region. Britain’s empire would cast a long shadow on U.S. relations with Southeast Asia, dissolving only in the 1970s when the British fi nally vacated their military bases in Singapore. So what? Of course British decolonization, the pro gress of Malaya and Sin- gapore toward in de pen dence, and their victories over communism shaped U.S. Cold War policy. Every domino in Southeast Asia was critical to the United States—by the domino logic their destinies were all intertwined. For good or ill, Eisenhower’s idiosyncratic depiction of Southeast Asian security had flattened the distinctions between the countries of the region. As domi- noes of identical dimensions, all must have appeared equally impor tant to U.S. strategy. 4 Introduction Yet most studies of the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia have focused on the U.S. war in Vietnam. Indeed, historian Robert McMahon’s decades- old remonstrance about the liter a ture concerned with U.S.-Vietnam relations could easily have been penned today—it is still “dauntingly volumi- nous” and liable to “overwhelm virtually all other regional issues.”12 There are far more histories of the Vietnam War than of U.S. relations with the rest of Southeast Asia combined. And as long as Vietnam’s fraught decolonization dominates our perspective, the history of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia traces familiar narratives of the United States’ best and brightest feeding their hubris and meeting ultimate failure, or the irony of U.S. leaders’ reluctant, pessi- mistic, and irrevocable slide into an unwinnable conflict in Vietnam. Fixation with Vietnam also burrows into the psychological wounds of U.S. defeat, the “Vietnam Syndrome” that for decades haunted U.S. citizens’ perceptions of their armed forces as well as shook their confidence in their leaders and the nation. Consequently, the views and responses of Southeast Asian actors clos- est to the war itself, besides those of the Viet nam ese, have curiously escaped detailed study. A number of historians have responded to this imbalance by delving into the United States’ other bilateral relations within the region. The work they do is invaluable. But these studies also tip the scales in the opposite direction, claiming the primacy of another Southeast Asian domino instead of Vietnam. One scholar has called Indonesia the “largest domino” in postwar U.S. foreign policy because of its “demographic weight . ​geo graph i cal expanse . ​[and] abundance of natural resources.”13 Another reminds us that Eisenhower voiced exceptional concern about Laos when he handed the reins of government to Kennedy in 1961; that U.S. officials thought Laotians more susceptible to communism than all other Southeast Asians, making Laos the domino that teetered at the head of the line, its position not “interchangeab[le]” with any other.14 One other historian has suggested that U.S.