To Cage The Red Dragon: SEATO and the Defence of Southeast Asia, 1955-1965.

• Author: Pearson, Mark
• Position: Book review

TO CAGE THE RED DRAGON: SEATO and the Defence of Southeast Asia, 1955-1965

Author: Damien Fenton

Published by: NUS Press, Singapore, 2012, 330pp, US$30.

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As Damien Fenton notes in the introduction of To Cage the Red Dragon, SEATO--the South East Asia Treaty Organisation--is a blindspot in the post-war history of the Asian region. Formed in 1954-55 in the wake of the French defeat in Indo-China, SEATO was a US-led collective security alliance against the further spread of communism in the region. Other SEATO members were the United Kingdom (then the colonial power in Malaya), France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan (which at that time included modern-day Bangladesh). But under the terms of the 1954 Indo-China peace settlement, SEATO membership was off-limits to the states most at risk from communist expansion--South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The political consensus underlying SEATO proved to be short-lived. It was unable to respond to the resurgence of conflict in Indo-China in the early 1960s and was relegated to bystander status during the Vietnam War. The fall of Indo-China to communism in 1975 left SEATO, in Fenton's words, with the 'inescapable taint of failure'.

To Cage the Red Dragon provides a valuable counterpoint to this received view. The book follows the first half of the alliance's existence with a particular focus on the military planning that lay at its heart. Drawing on Australian, New Zealand and British archives, Fenton, a military historian at the New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage, paints a detailed picture of SEATO's military planning processes and its plans for the defence of the treaty area. He argues cogently that, while SEATO did not have standing forces, it was the 'pre-eminent forum for the co-ordination of Western defence and strategic planning for the region' and an important channel for the United States to influence the military doctrine and force structure of its regional allies.

Fenton explains why SEATO military planners, haunted by the memory of Chinese intervention in the Korean War, focused first on the threat of conventional invasion by China and North Vietnam. The allied forces required to meet these contingencies were enormous, leading inevitably to a discussion within SEATO of the role of nuclear weapons. Fenton's account of the interaction between SEATO planning and US and UK nuclear strategies for the Asian region is one of the book's...