ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the broad-brush fashion the role played by the United States in the evolution of post-World War II Southeast Asia. It measures and accounts for change over time remaining one of the historian's chief responsibilities, then surely the twenty-year period that our metaphorical visitor slumbered through the offers interpretive challenges aplenty. There is also something peculiarly American about the preoccupation with the credibility of power, and with the excessive fear of external dangers and search for complete security so closely associated with it. Calculations about one's credibility are culturally bound, it bears emphasizing, as are threat assessments. The chapter emphasis the importance of the fear-based element of Hunt's triptych, as revealed especially by America's credibility fixation in its various guises. The element of American ideology clashed the decolonization era, with the equally powerful antirevolutionary current that was also embedded in the US belief system.
