I vividly remember being present at LSE several years ago when a talented young Singaporean scholar came to talk to us about what he called the ‘Darkest moment’ encompassing the fall of Singapore, ‘Chinese penetration’, and the domino theory. Wen-Qing Ngoei was that student and his fine performance on that day deservedly won praise from those attending the graduate seminar. Although aspects of his story were well known to me, Dr Ngoei (as he later became) had little difficulty in making my trip across the Strand worthwhile.
Arc of containment is everything I heard that Wednesday afternoon and much more. Ngoei's compelling and well-written narrative examines the geostrategic and political repercussions that enveloped Southeast Asia in the years after the ending of the Pacific War. He demonstrates convincingly just how worried the Western democracies became about the attraction of communism establishing itself in the region once Mao's People's Liberation Army had throttled Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War.
By 1949 the Cold War in Europe was an established fact of life. Would Southeast Asia go the same way? Could the fledgling independent states emerging from their colonial past be strong enough to resist the challenge posed by Chinese communism? After all, decolonisation was always likely to be a double-edged sword for the Western powers in the post-1945 era, but would national sovereignty win out over ideological magnetism? Who knew? Ngoei's book considers the problems that flowed in the wake of Mao's success and the nascent idea that the region might succumb to a wave of ideological fervour given the scale of the Chinese diaspora. If one state fell, others adjoining it could follow suit and the domino metaphor used by Eisenhower and others before him graphically made the point. Could anything be done to resist the falling of these dominoes?
For once the Americans looked to the British for inspiration. Their success in dealing effectively with the Malayan Emergency gave Malcolm MacDonald, the commissioner-general for Southeast Asia, an opportunity he didn't resist. Much advice on dealing with the Malayan Communist Party was given to an array of political emissaries sent from Washington to discover the secrets of counterinsurgency (COIN) so that the US could apply this doctrine in the future within the region.
COIN operations notwithstanding, much evidently depended upon finding national leaders in those states who were anticommunist by conviction and who valued freedom from any servile attachment to Beijing. If the West could provide support—both economic and military—to those states who wanted independence, it was hoped it would do much to strengthen these dominoes and leave them in place. It is for this reason that national leaders such as Tunku Abdul Rahman, Lee Kuan Yew and General Suharto (after the ousting of President Sukarno) became so important for those in the White House and Downing Street during these years. Ironically and remarkably perhaps, given the grave concern expressed about the fall of the region to communism if Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong won in Vietnam, the grim spectre offered up by Washington never came to pass in the immediate postwar period. Instead as the title of Ngoei's book suggests, an arc of containment was willingly imposed upon communism in Southeast Asia by the indigenous leaders of these emerging independent states and as a result the march of communism was held firmly in check.
Drawing on a fine array of primary and secondary sources, including recently declassified material previously unavailable to researchers, Ngoei offers a perfect snapshot of his entire thesis, namely, that ‘anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and its diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to U.S. hegemony’ (p. 5). I must admit that Ngoei pulls no punches when it comes to addressing the strong wave of anti-Chinese feeling which was at play in Southeast Asia and the extent to which this racism was used by the regional democracies to dampen down any broad-based appeal communism might have had for its citizens. Even if one accepts the resentment and hostility towards the Chinese community that flourished amongst the Malays or the Thais, for example, the situation in Singapore where 80 per cent of the population were ethnic Chinese represented another fascinating case study altogether. Was this another Cuba in the making? No wonder that those surrounding the Tunku, Eisenhower and Macmillan were for a time hesitatingly uncertain about the potentially unruly entrepôt lying one degree north of the equator. It speaks volumes, therefore, for the canny pragmatism and ruthless determination of Lee Kuan Yew that Singapore morphed from being seen as an unreliable partner to a staunch member of the anticommunist brigade in less than a decade.
Just as the Americans became more embroiled in Indochina and upped the ante in Vietnam, the British began to devise ways of reducing their presence east of Suez. It was not a smooth path, as the creation of Malaysia and the Indonesian backlash about neocolonialism brought about Konfrontasi in the 1963–65 period. Once again, British success in their COIN operations may have provided additional food for thought for the American military, but the cost of this campaign undermined the Wilsonian pledge to remain in the region for a further ten years and propelled a shabby British withdrawal from Singapore by 1971.
If the British military couldn't be relied upon any longer to keep the democratic ship afloat in the wider Southeast Asian region, the Americans needed what Professor Charles Maier has dubbed the ‘friendly kings’ to step up to the plate instead of them. ASEAN rarely gets a good press from foreign observers, but the fact remains that its founding in 1967 did provide a solid anticommunist base from which to contain communism within the region. Whether the domino theory was reversed (as President Johnson claimed in December 1967) or not is a moot point. But one thing is certain, it wasn't just because of the American entry into the Vietnam War that Chinese communism was contained.
