Wen-Qing Ngoei. Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia.

Abstract

Wen-Qing Ngoei’s excellent book, Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia, traces Malaya and Singapore’s twisting paths of decolonization from the British Empire to their integration into the American Southeast Asian Cold War following the Second World War. While the interconnections of empire, decolonization, and the Cold War in the extremely heterogeneous region of Southeast Asia are extremely complex, Wen-Qing Ngoei’s argument is both simple and a novel: despite America’s failure to prevent the advancement of communism in Vietnam, its larger Southeast Asian containment strategy was a success. It hinges on the creation of Malaysia in 1963, cementing what Roger Hilsman, John F. Kennedy’s director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, referred to as a “wide anticommunist arc” that stretched from Thailand to the Philippines to encircle China and Vietnam (3). This “pro-US trajectory,” Wen-Qing Ngoei concludes, “was more characteristic of Southeast Asian history after World War II” than “the embrace of communism” (5).