Interestingly, even earlier Thailand had sent a contingent to participate in the Korean War, which contributed to securing benefaction from the United States Thailand became party to the 1954 Manila Pact with the US that secured a formal American commitment to come to the defence of the country, and Bangkok became the headquarters of SEATO.
Burma, one of the historic political centres in Southeast Asia, became a province of British India in the nineteenth century, which led to an inflow of immigrants from India. Burmese nationalism before the Pacific War had a distinctive anti-Indian flavour. In 1937 Burma was separated from India and given considerable control over domestic affairs. During the Japanese occupation it was granted nominal independence in 1943, but this proved to be illusory, and although the British return was welcomed in 1945 there was now impatience for independence. The leader of the nationalist movement, Aung San, was a former student leader w2ho had been commander of the Japanese-sponsored Burmese National Army. The British offered independence within dominion status that in the end was rejected. Aung San, along with six of his colleagues in the cabinet, was assassinated in July 1947 before the formal transfer of power had been completed. Association with the Commonwealth had already been rejected and the Republic of the Union of Burma became formally independent in January 1948. But faced with ethnic rebellions and opposition from China’s communist leaders, combined with a lack of interest in its security from Britain and the United States, the new Burmese government opted for a policy of what Michael Leifer has called ‘non-offence’, especially towards its giant neighbor to the north. By the early 1950s it became active in voicing the concerns of a Asian neutralism (in the Cold War) and it was one of the key Asian powers that met bin Colombo to help convene the first Asian-African summit conference in Bandung in 1955.
Vietnam was the most important country in Indo-China and its history after 1945 was dominated by the armed struggle for independence from France, led by the communist Vietminh, that began in 1946 and culminated in the Geneva Agreements on Indo-China of July 1954 that resulted in the recognition of the independence of Laos and Cambodia an of a communist North Vietnam and a non-communist South. These eight years of armed struggle, later known as the First Indo-China War, brought together the three main dimensions of conflict: the global, the regional and the local. It also began a process of international and regional conflict that was not to be concluded before the end of the Cold War itself. At this stage the conflict initially involved the intensely nationalistic and fervently commumistic Vietminh against the returning French forces who had desperately and largely unavailingly sought to recruit a credible Vietnamese nationalistic alternative to the Vietminh. The two warring parties were soon to be backed by the victorious Chinese communists on the one side and by the Americans on the other. American support became possible only after the Elysee Agreements of March 1949, which gave the Indo-Chinese states nominal independence.
Once the Vietminh in the North had secured access to Chinese communist support after the latter’s domestic victory in 1949, the terms of the war turned remorselessly against the French.Up to that point the French forces had been in possession of most of the cities and towns in Vietnam, but had difficulty in controlling the rural areas. Thereafter the Vietminh were able to escalate their fighting capabilities from guerrilla to positional warfare. The French finally conceded that they should withdraw after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. That surrender has been called ‘the worst defeat any Western colonial power ever suffered on the battlefield at the4 hands of an Asian people’. The war which drew in the external powers became the primary agency that led to what has been called the internationalization of the problems of Southeast Asia. Within the context of the Cold War, it highlighted an American concern with the domestic conditions of the states of the area. It provided a framework for placing the domestic developments and the contending elites of the countries of the region within a Cold War syndrome that at tis height joined them with the axis of international as well as regional conflict.