No Longer Under the American Wing? The Thai Monarchy in Global Affairs

Introduction: Global Order, Cooperation between the Superpowers, and Alliance Politics in the Making of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War's end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi's focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi's detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat's desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that shaped the regional system in the Middle East” (p. 518). But it is not clear what he means by the “regional system,” or whether the Cold War had ever shaped it. It is also not clear what constituted the regional Cold War in the Middle East when so many of the wars were hot, not cold. The role of oil in shaping the local, regional, and international dynamics of the different versions of Cold War in the region goes totally unexamined.Lüthi's discussion of Asia is central to the overall thesis of his book. “Three countries,” he writes, “played major roles in Asia's Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates and not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union” (p. 115). Lüthi shows how the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese rapprochement with the United States, the unification of revolutionary Vietnam, and “the collapse of communism as a unifying program for national liberation” (p. 537) reshaped the Asian Cold War during the 1970s. But here again it is not clear precisely what the Asian Cold War was, and why Japan is totally omitted from its discussion. Perhaps Lüthi would argue that Japan lacked agency, but even if that was the case the country was crucial to the trajectory of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. Numerous historians—Howard Schonberger, Michael Schaller, Andrew Rotter, William Borden, and Robert Blum, among others—have shown in great detail how the goal of reconstructing and stabilizing Japan impelled U.S. officials to thwart Communist gains in Southeast Asia, create an independent South Vietnam, establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and support the rightwing military coup, crackdown, and massacres in Indonesia. While ignoring these dimensions of the Asian Cold War, Lüthi presents fascinating chapters on China, Vietnam, and India, on Asian-African internationalism, and on nonalignment. He shows that the Asian Cold War had many manifestations and permutations. At different times, in different ways, these trajectories affected the U.S.-Soviet global conflict and were influenced by that conflict. But Lüthi also acknowledges that “the end of the global Cold War primarily required a strategic rethinking in Moscow which would only come in March 1985 with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ascent to power” (p. 537).Strategic rethinking was necessitated by developments in Europe. Lüthi incisively describes the successful integrationist initiatives in Western Europe and the concomitant failures in the Soviet-imposed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. He emphasizes the ability of Western economies to recalibrate, innovate, and adjust to changing economic and monetary conditions, and he highlights the failures of centrally managed systems to do so. He minimizes the role of the United States in the reconstruction of Western Europe, mentioning that it “provided a stable and supportive framework” (p. 380). Ultimately, the failure of Communist economies to compete and modernize contributed to the flagging popular support for Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. But Lüthi does not make much of an effort to analyze the basic shortcomings in Communist systems, nor does he examine why and how liberal capitalist and social-democratic market economies were able to adapt successfully. For example, he describes the impact of declining oil prices in the 1980s and the constraints that imposed on Moscow's ability to subsidize the economies of its East European satellites, but he rarely makes an attempt to analyze the dysfunctionality of Soviet agricultural policies or the flawed operations of central planning. He stresses the resilience of West European economies but barely mentions the creation of social welfare states and the role of governments in providing minimal social provision and expanding educational opportunity, access to medical care, and support for basic research.This volume is a monumental attempt to de-center the Cold War and restore agency to middle-level powers and local actors. What it does is de-center international politics. It illuminates that much was going on in the latter half of the twentieth century that was not the product of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War but at times intersected with it and contributed to its denouement. Small powers had their own agendas, and regional dynamics had their own logic. In complicated ways, developments in one region influenced those in another. Thanks to the prodigious research of an author with staggering linguistic skills and breathtaking knowledge of multiple literatures, one comes away much better informed about the complexities of international politics but not equally enlightened about the Cold War itself.

Southeast Asian states revised their strategic horizons during 1993 through an ASEAN-inspired initiative arising from the impact of the end of the Cold War. That development occurred, however, without a corresponding revision in eco nomic horizons; nor was there any evident reconsideration of domestic politi cal orders, which were in general strengthened. During the Cold War, Southeast Asia and Indochina in particular had been coupled to international contention, which was inherent in the global balance of power. It was for this reason that Southeast Asia was described at one time as the Balkans of the Orient in an analogy with the condition of southeast Eu rope before the outbreak of World War I. With the end of the Cold War, global rivalry has ceased to exist in the same way as a point of reference for regional relations. This has been demonstrated with the end of the Cambodian conflict as a major international problem. The states of Southeast Asia now inhabit a different strategic environment but not a fundamentally different international society, which is distinguished still by the absence of a common government able to enforce law and order. Furthermore, as a result of the end of the Cold War, Southeast Asia has begun to be called into question as a coherent category through which to address prob lems of regional security. A growing interdependence in security matters be tween Southeast and East Asia in particular has been perceived and registered by regional states. At issue, however, is the significance of a novel development in extended multilateral security dialogue joining Southeast and East Asia, in spired during the year by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Does that development indicate a genuine structural adjustment to a new stra tegic horizon or is it little more than a tinkering with the form of existing re gional security arrangements? Apart from involvement in vestigial security arrangements, which are both a legacy of colonialism and the Cold War, provision for either collective de fence or collective security has not been undertaken on an exclusive basis by regional states. ASEAN, which repudiated military pacts from the outset, has established a limited regional security system based on a formula of conflict

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Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

Dominican – Asian foreign affairs have its roots in the establishment of strategic political relations that for a period of time were juggled between the extremist changes in ideological power of the socialist regions versus the already established democratic capitalism, fueled by the growth of communism and a later on fallen Soviet Union together with the representative democracy of the west, meaning Western Europe and the United States. These relations, however, were directly affected by the constant changes in the international community, a community that with the end of the cold war opened up to a new system of contemporary foreign affairs, which resulted from the globalization of the systems of government, social values and relations. Dominican – Asian relations are primarily based in the expansion of the foreign affairs of the Dominican Republic to Asia-Pacific and Oceania. This fomented the diplomatic, economical & commercial, cooperation, trade and cultural interchange of relations between the Dominican Republic and the Asian countries. Making it so that each were taken into consideration in the participation of forums and dialogues available for the regions, propelling the initiation of official visits. The United States plays an important role in the process of the establishment of foreign affairs between Asia and Latin America. The United States is a very important sponsor for both regions and both parts adjust their foreign affairs attitude depending of the influence of this big player. For Latin American, the United States is the main actor in the processes of foreign economical and political affairs because of obvious geopolitical circumstances, which influences their allies in times of negotiations. The ties of the Dominican Republic with the United States are date back for a long period of time and have influenced the Dominican nation’s foreign affair for a while. It is why the main focus that will be addressed would be Henry Kissinger’s’ soft power, an American theory. Kissinger writes about American foreign affairs as one of the most influential in the International Relations of the world. He describes American diplomacy as a strategic system that regulates internal democracy and expands itself abroad through its values. The United States may intervene in others’ affairs but it does not compromise in irreversibly, making itself a missionary of democracy, free trade and international law, the contradiction between isolation and an agent looking for an international mission. The role that the United States has played in international diplomacy gives it a moment of significant evolution that sees itself as a super power that a point was stuck until their interventions cannot be ceased but they also cannot acquire total power in the international community. Now a days, the United States faces sharing the wheel with other emergent powers like China, Russia, Europe, Japan, and India, without leaving behind the developing nations on the rise. To understand these processes and the lines of the relations during the timeline specified the next topics will be analyzed thoroughly: • Historical data. • Foreign Affairs. • Framework & theory in foreign affairs. • Importance of foreign affairs for every region and nation specified. • Foreign affairs between the nations stated. • General conclusions.

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The United States’ experience with Asia goes back to 1784. Over the subsequent two-and-a-third centuries scholarly research grew in fits and starts, reflecting historical developments: the growth of US interests and interdependencies in the region; the wars in Asia in which the United States fought; the ascendance of the United States to international leadership; and the post–World War II resurgence of Asia led by Japan, then the four tigers, and most dramatically China. The definition of Asia evolved correspondingly. Today, due to strategic and economic interdependencies, scholars tend to view it as incorporating Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia and Russian Asia as well as relevant portions of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The most recent US National Security Strategy (White House 2017, cited under Contemporary US-Asia Relations: General) reconceives the Asia-Pacific as the Indo-Pacific, stretching “from the west coast of India to the western shores of the United States” and constituting “the most populous and economically dynamic part of the world” (pp. 45–46) The first Asia scholars came to prominence in the United States during World War II, and the Cold War strengthened the impetus for interdisciplinary area and regional studies. Through the middle and late Cold War years, social scientists and historians concentrated further, but they increasingly looked inward at the development of their separate disciplines, away from interdisciplinary area studies as conceived in the 1940s and 1950s. While area studies declined, barriers between academia and the policy world emerged. Many scholars disapproved of the Vietnam War. “Revisionists” in the international relations, foreign policy, and area studies fields held that US policy and the extension of global capitalism were conjoined, suppressing both economic development and indigenous political movements in Asia and elsewhere. Simultaneously, behavioral science and postmodernist movements in policy-relevant fields developed. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Theory and methodology overtook the old approach of area-specific research that tried to integrate knowledge of the history, culture, language, politics, and economics of particular nations or subregions. Theory and methodology prevailed in research, tenure, and promotion. Policy-relevant studies became viewed as “applied” science. Another factor was money. Already under pressure, area studies was dealt a major blow at the end of the Cold War with cutbacks. Research on policy issues related to the United States and Asia increasingly came from think tanks that housed scholars themselves and/or contracted with university-based specialists. In recent years due to the rapid development of China and the urgent challenges it presents, interest in policy-relevant topics has revived on campuses and in scholarly research, especially in the international relations and modern history of the Indo-Pacific and the politics, economics, environment, and foreign and military affairs of China. Interest has revived too in the subregions of Asia, much of it driven by Chinese activities abroad.

U.S. President Donald Trump's “America First” posture has visibly disdained alliance- building as a central component of U.S. foreign policy. In the Asia-Pacific, this has undermined what Robert Kaplan (2019) has characterized as “the mutual confidence and implicit understandings that joined the United States with its allies in Asia.” The postwar regional security order in this region, underpinned by the U.S. bilateral security alliance network, is instead being sharply challenged by both the rise of China as a peer competitor and by the American public's intensifying fatigue—exploited by a transactional American President—resulting from maintaining credible deterrence and security guarantees to Eurasian allies for nearly three-quarters of a century. Trump's approach to alliance politics emphasizes more allied self-reliance in confronting national security threats and unparalleled U.S. expectations regarding allied defense expenditures and burden-sharing. It thus represents a historic departure from orthodox U.S. postwar international security politics which was predicated on Washington exercising an asymmetrical role in constant consultation with its defense relationships. As outgoing U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis observed when submitting his resignation letter to Trump in December 2018, the strength of U.S. allies and partnerships represented a core belief he brought to his office and that the President had a right to have a Secretary of Defense “whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects” (Mattis, 2018). Given these circumstances, the timing seems propitious to re-evaluate the credibility and durability of the U.S. bilateral network in the Asia-Pacific—also known as the “San Francisco System.” The germination of this project's conceptual emphasis occurred during several day-long workshops on regional security cooperation in an increasingly multipolar Asia, convened in Singapore by the Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) during 2017 and 2018. It was also motivated by an earlier study on the United States’ Asia-Pacific alliances and partnerships published in this journal's January 2016 edition (see Tow, 2016). While structural change in the region was already widely evident when that study was printed, the “Trump factor,” combined with the unexpected speed in the growth of China's military prowess and the intensification of its geopolitical dynamism, compelled this project's organizers to undertake updated assessments of the San Francisco System's fundamental credibility and sustainability. These unfolded at a project workshop which was convened in Singapore during late April 2019. Apart from the article contributors (whose work is summarized below), the event attracted the participation of officials from those countries aligned within the San Francisco System framework and independent scholars and analysts whose work specializes on alliance politics in Asia. This issue's lead article, co-authored by William T. Tow and Md Zaidul Anwar Hj Md Kasim, argues that the San Francisco System remains operative and viable despite Trump's intercession into the traditional American management of alliance politics. To remain so, however, American policymakers in the Trump administration and beyond will need to manage a more diverse and complex set of regional security challenges in ways that combine judicious threat response with creative order-building. The implication of this requirement is clear: Washington will need at some point to engage in various forms of regional multilateral security politics to a substantially greater extent than Trump and his team originally surmised when assuming office in early 2017. The second part of this issue probes the alliance and security partnership perspectives in Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Southeast Asia, and Australia, respectively. Lauren Richardson contradicts recent speculation about the evolution of a strategically “more independent Japan” vis-à-vis the United States. She instead argues that recent changes in Japan's defense posture have been predicated on the retention of the U.S.-Japan alliance as the core of Japanese national security policy and reflect Tokyo's response “to the expanding complexity and scope of the China threat.” This view coincides with Tow's and Kasim's assertion that alliance policy managers will need to recognize and adapt to more complex and challenging Asia-Pacific security challenges. Our contributors to the South Korean article advance the fascinating proposition that, apart from North Korean capabilities threatening to erode the credibility of U.S. extended deterrence commitments to the ROK, Chinese attempts at wedge-driving between South Korea and the United States represent risks to degrade and perhaps decouple the U.S.-South Korea alliance. This Chinese strategy will intensify regardless of the outcome of current diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula and it underscores the need for policymakers in San Francisco System member-states to recognize and adjust to the intensifying complexity of security politics in the region. Charmaine Misalucha-Willoughby adopts a theoretical perspective based on norm-building in alliance politics to explain the ongoing development of U.S. alliance relationships with the Philippines and Thailand and security partnerships with Singapore and Vietnam. She asserts that the San Francisco System's hub-and-spokes model is not failing but is experiencing “applicatory contestation” which U.S. policymakers must recognize and accommodate. Preservation of the international liberal order is the most important precondition for preserving the San Francisco System's credibility at a time when Chinese and other rival visions of order-building are vying for greater legitimacy. Brendan Taylor shows, however, that the stresses and strains currently being experienced in the San Francisco System are not solely the product of the Trump administration's perceived shortcomings and idiosyncrasies. Using a case study of one of America's most steadfast allies, Australia, he documents how the domestic political dynamics and debates of America's junior allies are also complicating U.S. strategy. Echoing the thrust of Misalucha-Willoughby's focus upon the need for alliance adaptation, Taylor's contribution highlights yet another set of challenges to the San Francisco System's future viability that its managers must urgently acknowledge. Finally, in their concluding article to this special issue, Sarah Teo and Ralf Emmers concur with Tow's and Kasim's judgment that the hub-and-spokes framework underwriting the San Francisco System is likely to persist but in somewhat modified form. However, they offer three caveats to the above generalization: the alliance network is likely to become more informal, more selectively interconnected, and characterized by more insecurity felt by both the United States and its allies toward one another. Greater informality would lower the pressure by U.S. allies in the region to make a fateful “choice” between a China growing stronger and a United States that may become increasingly qualified on the types of security guarantees it will extend to allies and partners over time. The principal investigators for this project (Tow and Taylor) acknowledge the financial support of the Korea Foundation Global Networking Department (Grant 270) in facilitating the research underlying it. This study was also partially supported through the Bualuang ASEAN Chair Professorship from Thammasat University and Bangkok Bank (to Professor Tow). We are especially indebted to Professor Aileen Baviera and her wonderful staff at Asian Politics & Policy for working with all of this special issue's authors to produce a publication far superior to any that would have appeared without their professional competence and diligence. We are also indebted to Ms Mary-Louise Hickey, Editorial Manager in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University, for her always steadfast and impeccable efforts in working with successive article drafts. Finally, we must acknowledge our colleagues at both the RSIS in Singapore and Hankuk University in Seoul for agreeing to work with us throughout the project's duration and to co-host its April 2019 workshop. Their insights and collegiality made the project a highly stimulating and enjoyable enterprise for all those concerned.

The end of the Cold War has inspired a wave of exciting new scholarship about the central international struggle in the decades following World War II. Dissatisfied with traditional diplomatic and military interpretations, historians have begun to investigate the crucial role that political culture played in shaping global conflicts. Cold War Constructions contributes to this reappraisal by illuminating the political and cultural assumptions underlying U.S. policies from the end of World War II to the mid-1960s. How were Cold War ideas and events shaped by American culture? How were they explained and promoted at home and around the world? And how did they vary from one geographical context to another? These are among the questions addressed in this collection of original essays. Each contributor focuses on a specific site of Cold War contestation -- Southeast Asia, India, Europe, Africa, Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba -- and analyzes the impact of domestic political culture on that particular conflict. Cultural attitudes, practices, and values are examined through a range of topics and sources, from travel literature and Broadway musicals to philanthropic organizations and Time magazine. Together the essays shed new light on such major Cold War events as the Cuban Revolution, the CIA overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, and the United States intervention in Vietnam. Contributors include Christian G. Appy, Mark Bradley, James T. Fisher, John Foran, Kevin Gaines, Van Gosse, Christina Klein, Jonathan Nashel, Andrew J. Rotter, Penny M. Von Eschen, and Wendy Wall.

Correspondence: The Profitability of Primacy

The end of the Cold War has changed the focus of discussion of U.S. and Chinese relations from global realpolitik to issues of human rights violations, trade balances and protectionism, and arms exports by China and sales to Taiwan. This shift of emphasis is understandable. During the Cold War, however, U.S. policy makers made the mistake of imputing too much importance to China's policies in the global system, especially in the case of the Vietnam War. Now that the Cold War is over, the United States should not neglect China's role and the relationship between China's policies and those of the U.S. in Southeast Asia, still an important sphere of influence for both powers but of particular importance for China. Southeast Asians are among the first to agree on the importance of the actions of both powers in their region. By developing world standards, Southeast Asia has been very successful at economic development but the potential still exists for political and military conflict. China's policy goals and means in Southeast Asia are complex and to some degree contradictory. On the one hand, the Chinese desire a peaceful and stable Southeast Asia where they can reap the economic benefits that come from cultivating friends or allies and profiting from the trade and commerce that a quiet and prosperous environment produces; on the other, China has territorial and security goals it considers important but that, to one degree or another, are viewed as disruptive by its neighbors. Beijing's dilemma requires it to balance these conflicting goals and the probable results of the policies calculated to attain them and decide which set of policies is most productive for China's interests. As the international agreement on Cambodia, improving PRC relations with Indonesia and Vietnam, and China's attitude toward ASEAN show, China and the

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The U.S. relationship with Southeast Asia has always reflected the state of U.S. interactions with the three major powers that surround the region: Japan, China, and, to a lesser extent, India. Initially, Americans looked at Southeast Asia as an avenue to the rich markets that China and India seemed to offer, while also finding trading opportunities in the region itself. Later, American missionaries sought to save Southeast Asian souls, while U.S. officials often viewed Southeast Asia as a region that could tip the overall balance of power in East Asia if its enormous resources fell under the control of a hostile power. American interest expanded enormously with the annexation of the Philippines in 1899, an outgrowth of the Spanish-American War. That acquisition resulted in a nearly half-century of American colonial rule, while American investors increased their involvement in exploiting the region’s raw materials, notably tin, rubber, and petroleum, and missionaries expanded into areas previously closed to them. American occupation of the Philippines heightened tensions with Japan, which sought the resources of Southeast Asia, particularly in French Indochina, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia). Eventually, clashing ambitions and perceptions brought the United States into World War II. Peeling those territories away from Japan during the war was a key American objective. Americans resisted the Japanese in the Philippines and in Burma, but after Japan quickly subdued Southeast Asia, there was little contact in the region until the reconquest began in 1944. American forces participated in the liberation of Burma and also fought in the Dutch Indies and the Philippines before the war ended in 1945. After the war, the United States had to face the independence struggles in several Southeast Asian countries, even as the Grand Alliance fell apart and the Cold War emerged, which for the next several decades overshadowed almost everything. American efforts to prevent communist expansion in the region inhibited American support for decolonization and led to war in Vietnam and Laos and covert interventions elsewhere. With the end of the Cold War in 1991, relations with most of Southeast Asia have generally been normal, except for Burma/Myanmar, where a brutal military junta ruled. The opposition, led by the charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi, found support in the United States. More recently American concerns with China’s new assertiveness, particularly in the South China Sea, have resulted in even closer U.S. relations with Southeast Asian countries.

Situated at the geographic and cultural crossroads of China and India, Southeast Asia has historically attracted the attention of larger powers and has been a site for several experiments in self-determination, regional autonomy, and order building. The region has featured prominently in global processes past and present: from colonial rule in its various Euro-American and Japanese permutations, and decolonization in revolutionary and neo-colonial stripes, to the three Indochina Wars that spanned the arc of the Global Cold War, and a new era of Sino-US Great Power competition. These historical experiences inform the themes that structure the academic study of Southeast Asia’s international relations. These include: the foreign policies of the regions’ states vis-à-vis one another and the outside world, the involvements of the Great Powers, and diplomatic projects spearheaded by Southeast Asian elites to express their vision for regional order. A conspicuous feature of the International Relations (IR) scholarship on Southeast Asia is the dominance of often apolitical and indeed depoliticizing “regionalism studies” centered on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—the region’s most enduring project in multilateral diplomacy created during the Cold War. Notwithstanding its significance, the focus on ASEAN and regionalism has been arguably excessive. It has led to a fixation with narrow theoretical debates centered on ASEAN and has stymied a wider exploration of the region’s international politics drawing on area studies, international history, foreign policy analysis, and political sociology which would shine the spotlight on how colonialism, race, gender, class, emotions, populism, trade, political parties, interest groups, state-society relations etc. have shaped the regions international politics. Indeed, some of the more exciting new scholarship on the international relations of Southeast has been emerging in other disciplines and fields, namely, Cold War international history, comparative politics, and new currents in IR inspired by political sociology and microsociology. This article outlines these new literatures with a view to open the study of international relations in Southeast Asia in historical, theoretical, and substantive terms. This essay is divided into nine sections. Following General Overviews, the section Colonial Legacies looks to the colonial period to understand patterns of class and identity formation that have structured contemporary fault lines in regional relations. Decolonization, Cold War, and the Emergence of a Southeast Asian International System foregrounds how Cold War international pressures internationalized decolonization struggles and shaped the birth (and splintering) of Southeast Asia’s post-colonial international system. The Indochina Wars highlights the pitched “hot” battles of the Cold War that unfolded in Southeast Asia, most famously as the three Indochina Wars. Diplomacy: From SEATO and Bandung to ASEAN examines the diverse diplomatic responses by Southeast Asian elites—including Bandung and ASEAN—in crafting a preferred vision for regional order. Foreign Policy surveys some of the key works in the genre of foreign policy analyses of Southeast Asia’s major states. Southeast Asian Security in the Era of United States-China Rivalry examines a body of conceptually innovative literature on how the region’s small and middle powers have responded to the escalating post–Cold War rivalry between the United States and China. In the First Image: Biographies and Memoirs foregrounds the large but underutilized genre of biography and memoir on Southeast Asia’s diplomatic players, a resource that could be better integrated with emerging “first-image” studies in IR. The final section identifies some of the major journals and platforms for online commentary that serve the study of Southeast Asia’s international politics.