Introduction

What does the end of the Cold War signify for Southeast Asia? How far has the Cold War been a cause of security problems in Southeast Asia? Obviously it played a major role, in at least six principal ways.

First, in a more general sense, it reduced the United Nations to relative impotence as the basic guarantor of international security.

Second, in a regional sense, it transformed the nature of the Malayan Emergency and the French campaign against the Viet Minh, most of all in the sight of the United States Administration, the Congress and people. What was seen as legitimate nationalism initially was viewed after 1950 as totalitarian in aim, and had therefore to be opposed, in this region as in Europe and Korea. The Cold War changed U.S. policies towards Southeast Asia from stand off and avoidance of commitments to the provision of support and ultimately to the acceptance of leadership in a long and frustrating struggle to stem the flow of Communism into Indochina. Given America's economic and military strength, this was a change of fundamental importance to the region. It was a change whose consequences are still strongly felt in the 1990s.

Third, the Cold War led both Communist China and the Soviet Union to support the Viet Minh. China's military assistance and political involvement in Indochina in the 1950s encouraged Beijing leaders over the following forty years to think of Indochina as a sphere of influence. This has a continuing legacy today. Soviet military and economic power also became significant factors on the Southeast Asian scene over the past thirty years, culminating in the use of Cam Ranh Bay and Da Nang by Soviet naval and air forces. The legacy of this Soviet involvement will be much less durable than that of the Chinese.

Fourth, the United States became steadily more formally and widely committed to the Southeast Asian and Southwest Pacific regions via its bilateral treaty with the Philippines, the trilateral ANZUS Pact, the informal trilateral consultational arrangements made with the British and French in 1952-53, and the eight-sided Manila Treaty, which we came to know best through its planning agency, SEATO, after 1954.