America's post-war role in Southeast Asia

Abstract

America's increasingly heavy involvement in the affairs of post-war Southeast Asia since 1953 has developed in large measure not from deliberate choice but from the logic of events attending a continuing revolutionary situation. Although the defeat of Japan's imperialistic designs was essentially the work of MacArthur's Pacific Command (Burma's liberation was accomplished by British-Indian-African forces), Washington in 1945 elected in entrust the taking of the Japanese surrender throughout most of Southeast Asia to Lord Mountbatten's Supreme Allied Southeast Asia Command. The exceptions were the already American-occupied Philippinese and the American-supported assignment of Chinese forces to occupy North Vietnam for purposes of evacuating Japanese forces. Washington's general disinclination to accept responsibilities in post-war Southeast Asia was attributable in large part to the inescapable and staggering burdens to be borne by American forces in occupied Japan and in liberated China and Korea. In the one country of Southeast Asia where the United States accepted post-war responsibility, the Philippines, Washington's previously determined policy was already to grant full independence. This was accomplished on July 4, 1946. Problems of decolonization throughout the rest of the region were left primarily to the British, the Dutch, and the French, who must perforce accept responsibility for making their own accommodations with emerging nationalist movements.