Arc of Containment Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia
Major studies of American foreign relations treat U.S. failures in Vietnam as the end of both a short-lived American empire and western imperialism in Southeast Asia. Author Wen-Qing Ngoei argues that Vietnam was an exception to the region’s overall pro-U.S. trajectory after 1945, that British neocolonialism and Southeast Asian anticommunism melded with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from formal colonialism to U.S. hegemony. By the 1970s, Southeast Asia’s anticommunist nationalists had established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained Vietnam and China.
About this Lecture
Lectures of Opportunity offer U.S. Naval War College (NWC) students, faculty, and staff an opportunity to learn more about national and international socio-political subjects that may be of relevance to the NWC community.