Introduction

If, as in victory in war, Pacific Asia’s successes had many claiming parentage, its crisis, unlike defeat, seems to have had still more progenitors. The crisis, which surfaced with the collapse of the Thai bhat on 2 July 1997, has joined the 1990-1 Gulf War as a defining event of the post-Cold War world. Like the Gulf conflict, the strategies of the main actors following its most intense periods are vigorously contested. In many respects, attempts to explain both the causes and the course of the Asian crisis are part of a broader struggle to define the nature of the world that has emerged in the Cold War’s wake.