ABSTRACT
The United States has had a greater impact on the development of Pacific Asia in the twentieth century than any other non-Asian country has had. This chapter describes how the scale, scope, and significance of American influence in the region has changed, particularly during the period of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. It describes these three major events in turn—the "loss" of China, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The chapter then examines how, in their wake, an unsentimental strategy of containing communism underwent its own transformations. Americans knew that fascism had been defeated; but the nation had an uneasy sense that it had been cheated out of its victory by the sudden new threat of communism. Standard South Korean and American scholarship has tended to view the Korean People's Republic as a communist front whose popularity was directly proportional to the degree it was able to camouflage its real intentions.
