Joey Long presents a very solid study, well researched, insightful, fair and articulate. Long's work will interest and benefit anyone curious about the interplay between decolonisation, the Cold War, great power foreign policy and local agency in Southeast Asia. Long brings to bear, through diligent work in multiple archives and a sound grasp of existing literature, a rare combination: an informed understanding of both American foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the Cold War and the complexities with which it engaged both allied and local agendas. He does not make the all-too-common error of reducing local agency, in this case Singapore — through Singaporeans in general and political leaders in particular — to a supporting role in a discussion of British–American Cold War discourse. Nor does he subscribe to the still too common and lazy view that political decolonisation in the region was a straightforward process of oppositional politics, first towards a declining European overlord, then to the emerging American assertiveness. Long rightly argues that it was just not that simple.
This book examines why, how and to what end the Eisenhower administration became involved in political change in Singapore, with particular reference to the Cold War. In so doing, Long displays commendable balance in judgement and does not subscribe to any of the ideological sacred cows that dot the field. Critical when the evidence so indicates, particularly regarding the Eisenhower administration's efforts to use covert intelligence and political operations to pursue its goals — or perhaps chase its ghosts — in a volatile Singapore, Long also gives credit where credit is due. This stems in part from his ability to lift his analytical gaze beyond the traditional confines of strategic problems and government-to-government intercourse, as catalogued so methodically in the FO371 and RG59 file series. Long's chapter on American cultural diplomacy brings out most strongly his sure grasp of both what made Singaporeans receptive to such approaches and how this fit into the larger policy picture. This chapter alone serves as a valuable response to a literature too ready to essentialise American Cold War practices in the Afro–Asian world. Singapore had particular characteristics that made it important to American Cold War priorities, receptive to some American influences, fractious when confronted by others.
The driving theme in Long's study is how the British, Americans and Singaporeans sought to fill the ‘political space’ being opened up by the larger process of Britain's contraction as a global power. His discussions of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and British policy regarding the deployment of nuclear weapons in Asia not only shed some new light on both problems, they also highlight important connections between these developments and the political development of Singapore. Long is somewhat critical of American efforts to evaluate and respond to political change in Singapore, in part due to contrasting them to simultaneous British evaluations and responses. But he rarely reaches beyond the evidence to do so, and retains his broad understanding of this relationship, as well as the importance of change over time. Effective American support for, and involvement in, labour and trade union politicisation in Singapore before 1958 gave way, from 1959, to a misreading of Lee Kuan Yew and the People's Action Party (PAP) that he argues resonates still.
Perhaps Long's most important scholarly contribution is to put his questions, and their principals, into both perspective and context. This work should prompt scholars of Singaporean political history to reconsider the importance of external involvement in the complications of decolonisation. It should also act as a cautionary note to scholars inclined to write off American Cold War policy in Africa and Asia as uniformly clumsy, narrow and counterproductive. Long perhaps sheds less new light on British policy, apart from his detailed discussion of the deployment of nuclear weapons in Singapore. Conversely, this is one rare issue on which his judgement can perhaps be criticised. Without examining Chinese and Soviet archives, it is not possible to argue whether or not deploying nuclear weapons in Singapore made the island city any more or less endangered before the British withdrawal in 1971; and given the United Kingdom's own permanent status as a primary target for nuclear warfare during the Cold War, it does not seem very apt to expect British decision-makers to have shown any more concern for the strategic vulnerability of an overseas territory. Long nevertheless demonstrates a solid grasp of both British sources and views, as well as the still lively debate over Eisenhower and his direction of American strategic foreign policy. There is too much ideological smoke surrounding the study of the Cold War in Southeast Asia and its relationship with political decolonisation. Long's study, at least for Singapore, stands as a welcome corrective.
