Book Review: Southeast Asia's Cold War: An Interpretive History by Ang Cheng Guan

The Cold War was anything but "cold" in Asia, let alone Southeast Asia. President Richard Nixon once remarked that the "Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat." Hot wars were commonplace in Asia during this time; from conflict in former French Indochina to insurgencies in the Coral Triangle, Southeast Asia was a theatre for some of the twentieth century's most defining conflicts. As is too common, the three superpowers of the period—the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—have tended to receive the most attention from historians.