Anne Foster has done the field a valuable service in placing the United States in Southeast Asia beyond the traditional temporal and chronological constraints that all too often concentrate on the Philippines at the expense of the neighboring European colonies, or which see the region as a whole as some sort of incidental reservoir for the wider conflicts of Northeast Asia. Rather, she deftly bridges these boundaries, arguing that a combination of US interests – state and private – extended their reach deep into the region in the interwar period and effectively shored up, and even determined, the colonial order prior to the Pacific War. She furthermore suggests that the ideologically ambivalent cultural projections of the US, made manifest in the films of Hollywood or even the elections of church councils, provided many Southeast Asians with a warped mirror for their aspirations of modernity and independence. In the main, I am convinced by the general thrust of her major argument even as I hesitate to follow this secondary claim given that her inventively titled work, which is the product of wide reading in colonial archives in three languages, necessarily focuses on the aspirations of policy makers and businessmen who could but speculate as to how their projections may have entered the consciousness of everyday Southeast Asians. Even so, she certainly raises questions for others to pursue, and effectively shows that Southeast Asia did exist in the minds of some outside strategists as a discrete sphere of external influence well before its formal designation as a zone of global conflict with Japan. Indeed, Japan too was a part of this global story from the very beginning of the century.
Foster's overall argument builds across several clearly written chapters that can each be read independently. After a useful introduction she considers the varying diplomatic relationships between the US and its wary compradors – represented by the British, French and Dutch – in the decade from 1919 to 1929, showing how, even as they increasingly lost out to American trading interests, the Dutch in particular recognized a rising patron with whom they had perforce to deal as they cast one wary eye north to Japan and the other more locally askance as the rhetoric of the Marxists took a hold. Chapter 2 then focuses on the increasing level of US investment and the discordant rhetoric of freedom and trade peddled by some at home who, as she argues in her third chapter, “An Empire of the Mind,” sought to render Southeast Asians more as independent consumers than passive colonial producers. That said, there was frustration at the limits placed on US trade (or at least the attempts to do so) by London and The Hague in particular, even as their industrialists and missionaries alike gained access to the region. Still, such limitations paled against the impact of the Depression, described in Chapter 4, which whittled away western profits and, as the final chapter makes plain, any lingering rhetoric of support for the ultimate independence of Southeast Asians residing beyond the inconvenient future Commonwealth of the Philippines.
Projections of Power shows well how the preamble to global conflict firmed up the long agreed, if seldom publically stated, principle of ongoing Western tutelage of Asian peoples. There were threats to this principle, to be sure, given that Southeast Asians of varying political formations had by now come actively to contest their status, even turning to violence in the highly pressurized environments of Sumatra and Java in 1926 and 1927, or again in Burma and Vietnam in 1930, which saw the Saya San and Nghe Tinh uprisings. Still, prior to the long-feared (or anticipated) conflict with Japan, these events were apparently seen as controllable and “traditional” outbursts within a system that was believed to work effectively for the (Western-dominated) global good.
In the main this is a valuable narrative to add to global history, and certainly to courses on Southeast Asian history. Still, the putatively “factual” nature of the sources of diplomatic history deployed has crowded out some of the potential for deeper social history in this project. At times Foster must hedge regarding the opinions and motivations of Southeast Asians, who are described more en masse than one might perhaps like. Even if comparisons can and have been made between events in Burma and Vietnam in the 1930s, I would hesitate to classify them as inherently (or yet unitarily) Southeast Asian, especially given one might just as readily reach across Asia to find similar outbursts of anti-colonialism, if not in the same time span, then in a similar vein.
Seen from the other side of the equation, too, the American missionaries are perhaps too briefly represented, especially given that these men and women themselves had diverse collaborations with, and opinions regarding, their counterparts from the French-, English- and Dutch-speaking worlds. That said, they certainly struggled in similar ways to make sense of the many peoples who apparently accepted their technological and cultural offerings while, all too often, rejecting or simply jettisoning the very faith that these Westerners believed was so crucial to upholding the package of modernity (given whiteness was not itself on offer).
This is not to say that Foster avoids the difficult question of reception and the relationships between peoples. Whereas the uprisings and leading personalities who took what they needed (such as Sukarno, U Nu and Ho Chi Minh) are appropriately, if momentarily, situated, it is in her third chapter that Foster brings us closest to the interface between the various projections of power she analyses and the Southeast Asian screens on which they were cast. To be sure, most observers agreed that US movies dominated, and the ideal of participatory democracy was increasingly noted as being worthy of emulation by educated nationalists who converted modern forms of knowledge into the cultural idioms of their own constituencies. Yet America was not the only exemplar of imagined egalitarianism (or yet alternative power) on the global stage, especially with the Soviet Union and Japan reaching out through their own networks that actively engaged Southeast Asians in positions beyond the factory floor and the cinema aisle. Regardless of the propaganda of Hollywood or the Sun-Maid Raisin Company, the US was already seen as an ambivalent model. At the turn of the century, some Western-educated Indonesians had expressed frustration in the press at the unfair treatment of Japanese sojourners in Hawaii or yet California (America was often a source of the bizarre rather than the exemplary at the time), and Capitalism, which was hardly seen as an exclusively American cultural offering, was itself under withering critique from all sides in the 1920s.
Still, America indeed loomed in the end. By the time of his celebrated defense oration of 1930, Sukarno predicted the inevitable conflict between America, Britain and Japan, the Asian power that he would briefly serve en route to the presidency of the Republic, rather than the “United States”, of Indonesia. And even if America first supported Indonesia against the enervated Netherlands, Sukarno was not long tolerated, while the claims of global capital and empire determined that Malaya and Vietnam would not be so readily released. Indeed it appears that Washington was as unmoved by Ho Chi Minh's referencing the American Declaration of Independence in 1945, as when the Filipinos announced their right to self-determination from Malolos nearly half a century beforehand. America was not yet prepared to stop playing Empire. It had hardly even begun.
