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 non-aligned dimension registered at the Asian-African 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 by vast land armies, and 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. Although the Pacific War had provided a strategic rationale for treating the
region as a whole, the Western allies came to treat Northeast and Southeast Asia separately. As the United States concentrated its forces on the assault on Japan itself, Britain was in effect entrusted with winning the war in Southeast Asia, with initial responsibility for Burma, Thailand, Malaya (including Singapore) and Sumatra. In July 1945, the rest of the Dutch East Indies, excluding the island of Timor, as well as Indo-China south of the 16th Parallel of latitude, were transferred to the Southeast Asia Command under Admiral Mountbatten. Indo-China north of the 16th Parallel was allocated to the China Command of Chiang Kai-shek, and the rest was designated as the Southwest Pacific Command.1 This division of labour was to accentuate the differences between the two sub-regions of Northeast and Southeast Asia in the early years after the war, since the immediate agenda for the north centred on relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the domestic evolutions of China and Japan, whereas
that of the south turned on the struggles for independence with the returned colonial powers. As became evident from the American involvement in the struggles in Indo-China from the late 1940s, it was the advent of the Cold War that began to link the two sub-regions together from both global and local perspectives. It was only then that the results of local struggles for power or independence were regarded as having implications for the global distribution of power and influence. That provided a basis, on the one hand, for competing local elites to seek and to obtain external patronage and, on the other hand, for the external powers to extend such support for their own competitive advantages.
