THE FIVE YEARS FOLLOWING THE END OF THE SECOND World War witnessed the unraveling of the Grand Alliance and the rise of the superpower confrontation. By the end of the 1940s, American hopes for a new world order based on peace and cooperation had been replaced with a sense of foreboding. Nowhere was this truer than in the Far East. Leaders in both Washington and Moscow watched as East Asia unexpectedly became the most violent region in the world. While the superpowers initially focused on a budding rivalry in Europe, a series of local wars in China, Korea, and Indochina transformed the region into a pivotal Cold War battlefield. These conflicts reached beyond individual nations to tilt the balance of power in the wider world and fundamentally change the superpowers’ geostrategic calculus.

The Third World had become a key theater of superpower competition. For a time, the battle for Asia looked as if it might determine the fate of the broader world. “Throughout the Orient there was war, or the talk of war,” wrote Hanson Baldwin, military affairs editor for the New York Times, on Christmas Eve 1950. “[T]he gauntlet has been thrown down in Asia and thousands of men from scores of different races march and shoot and die—from the sub-Arctic cold of Korea to the sticky tropical heat of Indo-China’s river deltas.” The shadow of “Red China” was spreading across the Pacific Rim nations of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam, he explained, over “the fecund, teeming millions” of East Asia. Beijing was “the brooding, ominous giant that looms over the rimlands; this is the mysterious, almost primeval, force which now shapes the destiny of the Orient.”¹

Americans such as Baldwin had good reason to be fearful as they watched what appeared to be a creeping Communist offensive in East Asia. Beneath the banner of Marxist revolution, the first wave of mass violence in the Cold War era swept through East Asia as Communist forces launched a series of bloody campaigns in China, Korea, and French Indochina. The resulting wars appeared to the Western powers as a coordinated Communist assault aimed at linking East Asia to the Soviet bloc. As a 1949 report from the U.S. National Security Council explained, “If Southeast Asia is also swept by communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia. . . . The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”²