The years 1900 to 1954 marked the transformation from an exotic, colonized "Far East" to a more autonomous, prominent "Asia Pacific". This anthology examines the grand strategies of great powers as they vied for influence and ultimately hegemony in the region. At the turn of the twentieth century, the main contestants included the venerable British Empire and the aspiring Japan and United States. The unwieldy leviathan of China, the European imperial holdings in Southeast Asia, and the expanses of the western Pacific emerged as battlegrounds in literal and geopolitical terms. Other less powerful nations, such as India, Burma, Australia, and French Indochina, also exercised agency in crafting grand strategies to further their interests and in their interactions with those great powers. Among the many factors affecting all nations invested in the Asia Pacific were such traditional elements as economics, military power, and diplomacy, as well as fluid traits like ideology, culture, and personality. The era saw the decline of British and European influence in the Asia Pacific, the rise and fall of Japanese imperialism, the emergence of American primacy, the ongoing struggle for independence in Southeast Asia, and China's resurrection as a contender for hegemony. Great powers shifted and so too did their grand strategies.

How America left its indelible footprint on the culture and politics of Singapore In the first decade after World War II, Singapore underwent radical political and socioeconomic changes with the progressive retreat of Great Britain from its Southeast Asian colonial empire. The United States, under the Eisenhower administration, sought to fill the vacuum left by the British retreat and launched into a campaign to shape the emerging Singapore nation-state in accordance with its Cold War policies. Based on a wide array of Chinese- and English-language archival sources from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States, Safe for Decolonization examines in depth the initiatives--both covert and public--undertaken by the United States in late-colonial Singapore. Apart from simply analyzing the effect of American activities on the politics of the island, author S. R. Joey Long also examines their impact on the relationship between Great Britain and the United States, and how the Anglo-American nuclear policy toward China and the establishment of a regional security institution (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) affected the security and decolonization of a strategic British base. Long sketches a highly detailed and nuanced account of the relations between the United States, Great Britain, and Singapore. He not only describes the often clumsy attempts by covert American operatives to sway top political leaders, infiltrate governments, influence labor unions, and shape elections, but he also shows how Eisenhower's public initiatives proved to have far-reaching positive results and demonstrates that the Eisenhower administration's policies toward Singapore, while not always well advised, nonetheless helped to lay the foundation for friendly Singapore-U.S. relations after 1960. As the first multi-archival work on the U.S. intervention in Singapore, Safe for Decolonization makes an important contribution to the literature on Southeast Asia-U.S. relations. It will be of interest to specialists in decolonization, diplomatic history, modern Southeast Asian history, and the history of the early Cold War.