ABSTRACT
It was the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s that brought about a junction in the Asia-Pacific between the international, regional and local dimensions of politics and military strategy. More precisely, it was the Korean War, begun in June 1950, that effectively integrated the Asia-Pacific into the Cold War system that had first emerged in Europe. But unlike the situation in Europe where the Cold War divided the protagonists into two clearly defined camps of opposing ideological, economic and political systems separated by an ‘iron curtain’, the divisions in Asia were less clear cut and were still being contested long after they had been settled in Europe. Moreover, in Asia there also emerged a nonaligned dimension registered at the AsianAfrican Conference held in Bandung in 1955. The difference between Asia and Europe was also apparent from the way the Second World War was conducted in the two theatres and from the different consequences of that war in each sector. The European war had been fought over established states between vast land armies which ended in a division of Europe between the Soviet and Western victorious armies. The war in the Asia-Pacific was won essentially through American naval and air power culminating in the dropping of the two atomic bombs. This left a scramble for power in many parts of Asia involving both civil wars and struggles for independence against the returning colonial powers.
