Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power

By Natasha Hamilton-Hart

In Hard Interests, Soft Illusions, Natasha Hamilton-Hart explores the belief held by foreign policy elites in much of Southeast Asia—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam—that the United States is a relatively benign power. She argues that this belief is an important factor underpinning U.S. preeminence in the region, because beliefs inform specific foreign policy decisions and form the basis for broad orientations of alignment, opposition, or nonalignment. Such foundational beliefs, however, do not simply reflect objective facts and reasoning processes. Hamilton-Hart argues that they are driven by both interests—in this case the political and economic interests of ruling groups in Southeast Asia—and illusions.

Hamilton-Hart shows how the information landscape and standards of professional expertise within the foreign policy communities of Southeast Asia shape beliefs about the United States. These opinions frequently rest on deeply biased understandings of national history that dominate perceptions of the past and underlie strategic assessments of the present and future. Members of the foreign policy community rarely engage in probabilistic reasoning or effortful knowledge-testing strategies. This does not mean, she emphasizes, that the beliefs are insincere or merely instrumental rationalizations. Rather, cognitive and affective biases in the ways humans access and use information mean that interests influence beliefs; how they do so depends on available information, the social organization and practices of a professional sphere, and prevailing standards for generating knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780801464508

Book preview

HARD

INTERESTS,

SOFT

ILLUSIONS

Southeast Asia and American Power

Natasha Hamilton-Hart

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

For Andika, who need take only the best from history.

Contents

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Acknowledgments

1. Beliefs about American Hegemony in Southeast Asia

2. Behind Beliefs: Hard Interests, Soft Illusions

3. The Politics and Economics of Interests

4. History Lessons

5. Professional Expertise

6. Regime Interests, Beliefs, and Knowledge

Appendix: Interviews

References

Acknowledgments

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Writing this book has often felt like an exercise in trespassing: straying over the territory of others and infringing on their kindness. I have tried not to be the sort of trespasser who leaves gates open and damages the crops. But I have been uncomfortably aware that the nature of this project suggests an unwarranted conceit on my part. Setting out to explain someone else’s beliefs is a presumptuous and rather impolite undertaking. Although I have relied greatly on the willingness of many individuals to share their beliefs and insights, the intellectual task undertaken in this book is not to explain individual beliefs but prevailing patterns of belief. The respondents who so very kindly gave their time to be interviewed were more sophisticated and nuanced in their answers to my questions than the fragments reproduced here can convey. Where I have sometimes noted that a respondent did not mention something during the interview, this should carry no implication that he or she was unaware or uncaring of it. I must also make it clear that those who consented to be interviewed do not necessarily agree with my argument or my interpretation of their interview responses. I have tried to ensure that I captured the meaning of interview responses accurately, but ultimately there is an unavoidable layer of interpretation for which I must take responsibility. Since many of those interviewed wished to remain anonymous, I thank them collectively here and ask for their forgiveness if I have made errors in interpreting their responses.

For very helpful advice and other types of assistance, I thank (in Southeast Asian–style name order) Bruce Lockhart, Chie Ikeya, Chong Ja Ian, Don Pathan, Douglas Kammen, Evelyn Goh, Goh Benglan, Jaime Naval, Jamie Davidson, Janice Bially Mattern, Lina Alexandra, Mafie Tanyag, Michelle Tan, Mohamed Jawhar Hassan, Nguyen Do Thuy Anh, Pham Quang Minh, Puangthong Rungswadisab, Richard Stubbs, Richard Robison, Rizal Sukma, Simon Tay, Soravis Jayanama, Tanya Laohathai, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, and Zakaria Haji Ahmad. I am also grateful to Roger Haydon at Cornell University Press for his enthusiasm for the project and his sharp suggestions for making it better. Tran Anh Dao cheerfully translated Vietnamese history textbook material. As in the case of those interviewed for this book, those who helped in numerous other ways did so without necessarily agreeing with my analysis—or, in the case of those who facilitated my visits to Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Bangkok, and Manila—being aware of the book’s argument, which was then still under development.

The research for this book was completed when I held a position in the Southeast Asian Studies department at the National University of Singapore, where I spent ten years immersed in an area studies milieu and, for most of this time, happily distant from my disciplinary home in political science. As I worked on this project, I became more appreciative of the strengths of both approaches to scholarship and, at least at times, hopeful that they could be happily married. Grants from the Academic Research Fund and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore supported parts of the fieldwork on which this book draws.

The events that hit the world news headlines in the years from 2002 onward form part of the backdrop of this book. I would probably not have written it, however, if it had not been for a number of outstanding historians and journalists whom I have never met in person but whose work opened my eyes.

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BELIEFS ABOUT AMERICAN HEGEMONY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

There is little effusive sentimentality about the United States among foreign policy elites in Southeast Asia today. More than sixty years have passed since President Manuel Roxas of the Philippines declared that the safest course for his newly-independent country was to follow in the glistening wake of America.¹ His view was emphatically rejected by many Southeast Asians at the time and does not resonate in a region formally committed to independence and norms of noninterference.² Extravagant statements professing a kindred spirit and shared vision sometimes still adorn official speeches and communiqués, but these appear intended for diplomatic consumption only. Leaders and foreign policy thinkers in Southeast Asia more often seem to identify with Lord Palmerston’s dictum: Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests. They generally paint themselves as rational and pragmatic, dealing with external powers according to the dictates of national interest rather than sentiment. Yet behind the apparently hard-headed calculations of interest lie beliefs that cannot be explained as straightforward responses to a set of external conditions. Rather than being the product of formal reasoning, assessments of probability, or self-aware attempts to navigate tradeoffs and uncertainties, many core beliefs informing foreign policy orientations reflect commitments and biases that are political, cognitive, and affective. Beliefs in this sense are both powerful and independent.³

This book investigates one such set of beliefs: beliefs about the international role and power of the United States held by foreign policymakers and practitioners in six Southeast Asian countries. Their beliefs are the basis on which they define some countries as potentially threatening and others as relatively benign. Such beliefs are foundational in the sense of making possible specific foreign policy decisions as well as underlying broad foreign policy orientations of alignment, opposition, or nonalignment. With some qualifications and exceptions, majorities in the foreign policy communities of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam see the United States as a relatively benign international power. Although they may dislike many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, it is close to axiomatic in foreign policy circles that the United States is, overall, a benign and stabilizing power. This belief underlies Southeast Asian support for a regional order in which the United States has exercised predominant power and is thus instrumental in sustaining American power in the region.⁴ Beliefs therefore matter. But what drives the beliefs themselves?

For those who share a belief in the benign nature of American global predominance, it may seem unnecessary to explain why some people believe the United States to be benign. If people manage to see an external reality more or less as it is, why bother to explain this? This book argues that foundational foreign policy beliefs are not straightforward reflections of an external reality and in many cases cannot be tested against an external reality. They inevitably reflect the interests and position of the believer. They depend on implicit tradeoffs that are not only incommensurable but also affectively disturbing. They frequently rest on attitudinal positions of liking or disliking and affective (feeling) dispositions, neither of which can be considered accurate or inaccurate. This does not mean that beliefs are insincere or merely instrumental rationalizations. Interests influence beliefs, but how they do so depends on available information, the social organization and practices of a professional sphere, and the prevailing standards for generating knowledge.

Quite a lot changes if beliefs are understood in this way. Rather than seeing responses to American power as primarily dependent on what the United States is or does, this approach directs our attention to those holding beliefs about the United States. For this book, it means locating foreign policy elites in domestic contests for political power and material advantage and specifying the ways in which American actions have affected domestic contenders for power. Understanding the beliefs of foreign policy elites in Southeast Asia also requires paying attention to the conditions under which they operate: the practical demands of their work, the information that is most abundant and available to them, and the standards of evaluation and reasoning to which they are exposed. Ultimately, this provides greater leverage for explaining shifts in beliefs about the United States—and divergent beliefs across different groups of people—than approaches that focus mostly on American material capacities, motives, or actions. American power and the uses to which it is put matter, but to understand responses to the United States, we need to look at the local processes through which beliefs are fashioned.

American Primacy

The United States has made no secret of its claim to primacy in Asia. The United States Pacific Command, based in Hawaii, displays on its website a map of the Pacific Rim and the Indian Ocean. The parts marked in red—from New Zealand and Australia in the south to Japan and China in the north, an area that includes India and all of Southeast Asia—are designated its Area of Responsibility, while the Area of Interest is colored blue: Canada, the western part of South and Central America, the Middle East, and the east coast of Africa.⁵ This graphic, public depiction of claimed responsibilities by the United States generally passes without comment in the region, in contrast to the speculation, frequently tinged with suspicion, regarding the power projection capacities of the Chinese military.⁶ Other indicators of the U.S. claim to primacy are not hard to find: they are written in major policy documents, and every American president since the early 1990s has made explicit assertions of primacy.⁷ Although official statements since 2009 have given more space to the need to work with allies and friends, the military might of the United States continues to make it more than merely first among equals. For the time being, no other country comes close to matching its firepower, force projection capacities, technological sophistication, or economic wealth.⁸

This global American preeminence has endured for nearly two decades and unambiguous signs that other countries are actively seeking to balance against the United States are hard to find. This has led to a whole series of coinages, from soft balancing to pre-balancing and hedging, to describe what might be indicators that the rest of the world wants to see the scales weighted more evenly.⁹ Yet against such signs, there is an equally telling accumulation of evidence that much of the world has been fairly content to live with American primacy. In the last twenty years, a long list of countries has offered increased access to the U.S. military in terms of basing or other facilities, while only a few have chosen to reduce such access.¹⁰ Despite the widespread condemnation of American foreign policy and military adventurism in the years between 2001 and 2008, many governments stepped up programs of bilateral cooperation with the United States. This is not inconsistent with a simultaneous desire to see the taming of American power—a reduction in its unilateralism and aggression, greater respect for international law and multilateral institutions, and less hypocrisy on issues such as human rights.¹¹ Nonetheless, in the absence of decisive moves to help shore up potential countervailing centers of power, enhanced cooperation on issues ranging from counterterrorism to bilateral preferential trade agreements and facilitation of American military operations speaks in favor of the idea that many governments still see the United States as the indispensable nation more than as a potential threat.¹²

The United States and Southeast Asia: Elite Views and Continued Cooperation

Foreign policy elites in Southeast Asia, a region that has lived with American hegemony since the end of World War II, appear to see the United States in a relatively positive light. In 2004, when worldwide approval of the United States was at its lowest, and majorities in many countries were citing the United States as the greatest threat to international peace and stability, a group of Southeast Asian foreign policy experts was brought together by the Asia Foundation to voice opinions on American foreign policy. The rapporteur, a prominent Singaporean diplomat, reported some concerns but embedded them within the larger judgment that Southeast Asia appreciates the indispensable role which the United States has played in the maintenance of regional security and its positive role in spurring the region’s rapid social and economic development. . . . Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has provided Southeast Asia with a security umbrella that has been a stabilizing factor for the development of the region.¹³ There is, of course, likely to be a pro-American bias in a group of respondents selected by the Asia Foundation. However, similar references to the United States playing a positive, if not indispensable, role in ensuring regional security and prosperity over the past sixty years are commonplace in Southeast Asian foreign policy circles.¹⁴

Increased attention to American unilateralism and aggression in the wake of 2001 dented this apparent consensus in the foreign policy community only minimally. American foreign policy certainly had plenty of Southeast Asian critics in this period, but as several accounts of bilateral relations have concluded, countries in the region put whatever feelings of unease they may have felt behind them and moved to cement their ties with the United States.¹⁵ The chairman of a Singaporean think tank asserts, Most in Asia do not desire an end to U.S. primacy. Indeed, U.S. presence is what they have known, lived with, and largely prospered from over the past few decades. The overarching wish of Asian states is instead that the present hour of U.S. primacy continues to provide stability and show benevolence for all, even in the face of post-9/11 exigencies and imperatives.¹⁶ Similarly, a scholar at a security think tank notes, American predominance and leadership continue to be acknowledged and valued generally in Southeast Asia despite reduced comfort due to the Iraq War and the Bush administration’s style of conducting business. Nonetheless, Southeast Asians by and large prefer U.S. dominance.¹⁷ Although not usually acknowledged so explicitly, a hierarchical regional order led by the United States appears to be accepted by most Southeast Asian governments, just as it has been—with some caveats—by China and Japan.¹⁸

Elite perceptions of a benign America do not necessarily resonate with public opinion in Southeast Asia. Indeed, consonant with declining American standing globally in the years after 2001, the United States was distinctly unpopular in some Southeast Asian countries at this time.¹⁹ Public opinion polling data, however, are volatile and tend to capture views that may be superficial and disconnected from policy and behavior.²⁰ In most Southeast Asian countries, according to Simon Tay, Despite some negative public opinion in many societies and perhaps private doubts, anti-Americanism has not been entrenched as state opinion. Asian leaders have instead responded quite promptly, whether as true allies or opportunistic ambulance chasers, to align their own agenda with that of the United States.²¹

Singapore stands out among Southeast Asian countries as the most consistent and unequivocal in its support for U.S. foreign policy after 2001. It sent a small noncombat unit to Iraq, increased counterterrorism and military cooperation with the United States, and concluded a bilateral preferential trade agreement with the United States in 2003. Singaporean leaders vehemently took up the American claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified as a response to an alleged Iraqi weapons program.²² The Philippines and Thailand, treaty allies of the United States in the region, also joined the coalition of the willing in support of the war against Iraq. Thailand’s early equivocation was rumored to have been overcome with some arm-twisting of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra by American officials. Thaksin overcame any initial reluctance to support U.S. policy (as well as anger at American criticisms of his human rights record) and oversaw increased cooperation in military and security arenas as well as the pursuit of a bilateral trade agreement with the United States.²³ The Philippines not only sent a small contingent to Iraq, it also invited U.S. troops to act as advisers in the fight against insurgency and terrorism in the south of the country. The payoffs—increased military aid and improved positioning for contracts in occupied Iraq—were widely noted.²⁴ The sour point in relations was the withdrawal of the Philippine contingent earlier than scheduled due to the kidnapping of a Filipino national. This move, however, was taken in the context of a generally supportive, pro-American stance.²⁵

In Indonesia and Malaysia, public anger at American foreign policy presented some constraints for political leaders. The Indonesian vice president Hamzah Haz in 2002 was among many politicians who criticized the United States publicly, including calling the United States the real terrorist.²⁶ However, quiet cooperation actually increased in this period, particularly after the terrorist attack in Bali in October 2002. President Megawati Sukarnoputri was accused by political opponents of being overly supportive of the United States—but she was defeated in the presidential elections of 2004 by her own former security minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired army general who had longstanding friendly relations with the United States, which he pursued in office.²⁷ Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, accused the United States of using the war on terror to dominate the world in public speeches to global as well as domestic audiences. However, his stinging criticisms of the United States were interpreted by many members of the foreign policy community in Malaysia to reflect a mixture of his own well-known proclivity for combative, antiwestern rhetoric and his desire to be seen as an independent spokesman for the developing world. Given the popular Malaysian antipathy to the American war on terror and war against Iraq, the political motive for doing so was fairly apparent.²⁸ As noted by the head of a government-linked Malaysian institute, despite these criticisms, Malaysia’s bilateral ties have improved significantly in the last two years.²⁹ Malaysia continued military cooperation with the United States and did not cancel exercises such as an annual military training program, which continued as usual in the months after the invasion of Iraq.³⁰ Mahathir’s statements were not prominently echoed by his eventual successor, Najib Abdul Razak.³¹

Overall, the pattern of bilateral relations between the United States and most Southeast Asian countries suggests that the governments of these countries are basically comfortable with U.S. influence and presence. Notwithstanding bursts of criticism from outspoken leaders such as Mahathir and Thaksin, at a moment when U.S. unipolar preponderance at the global level was unprecedented and its foreign policy was attracting extraordinary levels of condemnation, the main response from Southeast Asian governments was to increase cooperation and continue efforts to deepen engagement with the United States. Popular opinion set some constraints on cooperation in the case of Malaysia and Indonesia but has not had enduring consequences. Perceptions of the United States were returning to more positive levels even before the end of the George W. Bush presidency.³² Indeed, only a short while afterwards—at a time when most causes for grievance against the United States remained fundamentally unaltered—positive views of the United States were significantly higher than negative views in many countries.³³ Not only is public opinion volatile, observe Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, but the consequences of anti-American views are more difficult to detect than one would think on the basis of claims made by the Left. . . . Superficial manifestations of anti-Americanism seem to have few systematic effects on policy.³⁴

There is no assurance that this will continue.³⁵ But if foundational beliefs about the United States are in the process of changing, an explanation of why this is so needs to begin with an understanding of where the beliefs come from. Why were Southeast Asian policy elites inclined for so long to see U.S. hegemony as benign?³⁶ Debates about U.S. primacy present glimpses of how other parts of the world respond to the United States. Critics of the United States cite negative public opinion polls and nonstate retaliation against the United States, while defenders claim discontent is peripheral and transitory.³⁷ There is a cluster of work on public opinion and social attitudes, and some collections present avowedly elite or nonrepresentative views.³⁸ It remains that far more attention has been given to the United States—its motives, actions, and ideas—than to the countries affected by it. Integrating analyses of what the United States does with explanations of how other countries perceive it is a challenge for critics of U.S. foreign policy in particular. They have catalogued the negative consequences of American foreign policy and may have explained why people hate America, but they have not paid serious attention to the question of why, given these grievances, blowback has been so limited.³⁹

For structural realists who predict a return to balancing behavior and the erosion of unipolarity, the question must be why signs of balancing against the United States by great powers (and bandwagoning with such powers by smaller states)—to the extent they exist—have been so ambiguous and so slow to materialize. After all, the United States has presented the world with the challenge of primacy since the beginning of the 1990s. The simplest explanation for the lack of clear balancing responses is that the United States is not perceived as a potential threat because it is not a threat.⁴⁰ The belief that U.S. power and presence in Southeast Asia is, overall, positive for the region is almost axiomatic in foreign policy circles. Before concluding that those who see the United States as a distinctively benign hegemonic power have got it right, however, we must investigate more fully the politics behind perceptions of the United States and the question of whose perceptions matter in policy terms.

The Argument in Brief

Beliefs about American power in Southeast Asia merit investigation not because they necessarily rest on misperceptions (although sometimes they do) but because they rest on a combination of specific interests and illusions. These interests and illusions deviate from common understandings of the sources of foreign policy. The interests that drive orientations towards the United States are primarily the regime interests of the governing party or ruling elite in each country—that is, the interests of the country’s political leadership in securing power and rewarding supporters and, in subsidiary fashion, the career interests of practitioners and others in the foreign policy community who depend on the support of political powerholders.⁴¹ For the noncommunist political elites of Southeast Asia, notwithstanding some ups and downs in bilateral relations, the United States has been a largely benign power over the last sixty years. Nothing about the international structure of power in the postwar world dictated de facto or formal alignment with the United States. Instead, the origins of alignment lie in the outcome of domestic political struggles in these Southeast Asian countries and the sectional interests of contenders for power who seized the opportunities presented by American anticommunism.

These interests are rather different from the aggregate national interests and considerations of general stability to which policymakers and foreign policy thinkers so often refer when explaining their beliefs. While cynics or critics may be quick to dismiss their beliefs as insincere and self-serving, this judgment is unsatisfactory as an explanation for beliefs. Beliefs may be self-serving but nonetheless sincere.⁴² The interests of members of the foreign policy community and the epistemic environment in which they work create cues that make it plausible to conclude that the role of the United States in the region confers general, rather than personal or sectional, benefits. The epistemic environment in this sense consists of both the information that is prominently accessible through work tasks and routine exposure and the epistemic standards for generating and validating knowledge within a professional sphere. Taken together with a number of common cognitive, motivated, and affective biases and shortcuts in belief formation and belief maintenance, the epistemic environment shapes beliefs about the United States and other contenders for hegemonic status in ways that deviate from common assumptions that they are the product of conscious processes of evaluation and probabilistic reasoning.⁴³

This book terms such beliefs illusions, but this does not mean that they are necessarily inaccurate. Attitudes cannot be either accurate or inaccurate, given that they are evaluative orientations of favor or disfavor. Evaluative and emotive orientations are, however, important influences on how individuals assess evidence, perceive credibility, and understand their own interests.⁴⁴ Certain beliefs may be accurate or inaccurate as measured against an externally verifiable standard. Later chapters show that some specific beliefs about the United States and the regional environment held by policymakers and practitioners are inaccurate. In many cases, the accuracy of beliefs is inherently difficult to verify. Even with hindsight, they may reasonably be subject to competing interpretations and counterfactual arguments. When assessments relate to complex and contingent future events or counterfactual historical scenarios, the inherent uncertainties involved make it difficult to make an a priori determination of accuracy. Yet policymakers are frequently called upon to make judgment calls on issues of this type.⁴⁵ The beliefs and attitudes that allow them to do so are illusory in that they may turn out to be more or less accurate, but their relative accuracy is largely incidental. In some ways they are akin to rumors. As Ron Robin argued in a study of American visions of the enemy during the Cold War, threat perceptions were based on rumor—an amalgam of opaque knowledge and cultural codes—and veracity had little to do with the rumor’s reception.⁴⁶

Beliefs and attitudes that are illusions in this sense should not be mistaken for accidental or random products. They are shaped, first, by the direct political, economic, and career interests of powerholders, foreign policy practitioners, and those in the wider foreign policy community. In the cognitive processes by which information is processed, judgments are formed, and decisions are made, self-interest exerts an influence through multiple pathways. Second, beliefs and attitudes are shaped by a set of knowledge-related constructs, including information and judgments of how to interpret it, as well as emotional responses. While these could extend to a broad range of inputs, this book focuses on two sources: national historical narratives and professional expertise circulating in the foreign policy community. Both history and professional expertise are becoming more pluralistic, due to domestic political change and declining U.S. material capacity. Nonetheless, national historical narratives and professional expertise still, to varying degrees, lend themselves to the formation of beliefs about the United States as mostly a benign power.

To many, the idea that knowledge is not neutral but rather is shaped by powerholders working to further their own interests is not novel or surprising. Yet there are large gaps when it comes to applying this idea in foreign policy contexts. Mainstream international relations approaches have been largely divorced from studies of the intellectual foundations of the Cold War.⁴⁷ The implications of these studies have not been explored in scholarship on international relations and foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Historians and scholars of the region have begun the task of documenting American influence on scholarship, development knowledge, and policy in Southeast Asia during and after the Cold War.⁴⁸ What we know of such American influence in Southeast Asia, exercised through education, training, sponsorship, the provision of consultants, and the activities of private foundations, points to the need to extend our understanding in two directions. First, we know relatively little about how Southeast Asian actors themselves propagated beliefs about the United States and the foreign policies of their own countries. Second, if we concede that beliefs and interests intersect in significant ways, we are left with the challenge of explaining beliefs in a way that acknowledges the role of interests but does not lapse into crude and ultimately uninformative judgments of key players as either wicked or stupid.

By looking at both the hard interests of powerholders and the soft illusions that sustain beliefs, the approach followed here avoids looking at either material factors or ideational constructs in isolation. Ideas, as Thomas Risse-Kappen has noted, do not float freely.⁴⁹ It is necessary to draw attention to their moorings in hard interests and the intermediating structures of knowledge production. An explanation for beliefs should be able to identify reasons why they change, albeit with lags and unevenness. As American capacity, or willingness, to sustain a foreign policy that meets the interests of both domestic constituencies and foreign friends declines, the interests that Southeast Asian powerholders have in an American-led order can be expected to decline. Gradually, this will modify the epistemic environment in foreign ministries, think tanks, and university settings, as different work tasks alter the production and reproduction of information and reduce the density of personal ties.

The distribution of information relevant to understanding the role of the United States may also change independently of American capacity or behavior. If members of the foreign policy community were to change their media diets or intellectual exposure, for example, to sources that are markedly less U.S.-positive, their impressions of the United States would become more negative. As national histories become increasingly contested, we can expect the past to furnish revised foreign policy lessons. Whether such shifts in knowledge production and exposure occur depends a great deal on the outcome of domestic political contests in Southeast Asian countries. If different groups with different memories, agendas, and conceptions of interest capture political influence, we should then see changes in attitudes to the United States and beliefs about the role it plays in the region.

Evidence and Approach

This book examines the beliefs of members of the foreign policy community in six Southeast Asian countries that vary in terms of their history of regime interaction with the United States and the epistemic environment facing foreign policymakers and practitioners. Elites in three of these countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore—can be considered true believers in the proposition that the United States is a fundamentally