The Limits of Empire - The United States & Southeast Asia Since World War 2 (Paper) - Robert Mcmahon

In the years following World War II, as the United States began to focus on the global containment of communism, few regions were considered as much of a potential battleground as Southeast Asia. The author contends that policymakers exaggerated the significance of the region within the global power balance, dangerously over-extending the United States and resulting in the Vietnam War.;This book situates the War in its broad regional context and offers a picture of how US strategies of containment and empire-building spiraled out of control in Southeast Asia. The text follows the security policy through to the present day, showing how US enthusiasm for the region declined, and conceptualizing the US strategic mission as empire-building, rather than merely containment. The theoretical issues touch upon the appeal of nationalist, anti-Western currents to Third World peoples, the inadequacy of empires as a means of asserting control over non-Western peoples and the chasm between America's postwar ambitions and the realization of the limits of its power.