The nations of the Pacific Basin - in East and Southeast Asia, Australasia, the Pacific islands and the Americas - make up the world's largest economic zone, and its most culturally diverse region. In recent years its Asian 'Tiger Economies' have suffered economic collapse and unfinished business from the Cold War has produced continuing conflict and instability. The new edition of this pioneering book traces the postwar inter-relationships of all the rim and island nations. It gives a unique impression of the make-up of the region, and the tensions within it. The book integrates a wide range of information from books and articles; from published and unpublished sources, including recently opened Russian and American archives; and from the first-hand experiences of participants, including those of the author, in Pacific Basin affairs. Vigorously written and strongly argued, no other account brings together all the threads of the development of international relations in this complex and fascinating region.

This postwar study of the history of the Pacific Basin links together the interrelationships of the rim nations of east and southeast Asia, Australia, North and South America and the Pacific Islands. It looks at the various different regions and how they all interconnect. It explores major themes such as: the creation of Japan's new economic order in the region; the United States' crusades against communism, real and imagined, in Asia and Latin America; national struggles for independence against colonial rule; and the shifting patterns of conflict and co-operation between the rim states themselves.

In a fast-moving and incisive narrative, Roger Buckley examines America's close and continuous relationship with the Asia-Pacific region from the end of the Pacific War to the first days of the Presidency of George W. Bush. The author traces the responses of the United States government to the major crises in the area through the Cold War decades and the initial post-Cold War years. He demonstrates how the US sought to maintain its dominant regional position through a series of security alliances and its own political, military and economic strengths. Professor Buckley examines the subject from geopolitical perspectives to provide a gateway to the understanding of a complex region certain to be of global importance in the twenty-first century.

Tracing the postwar inter-relationships of all the rim and island nations of the Pacific Basin since 1945, this text includes expanded coverage of China's relationships with Taiwan and tensions between North and South Korea.

This volume looks at the impact on the wider world of the end of the European empires and their replacement by a new international order dominated by East-West rivalries. After surveying the decolonization process, the book looks successively at the different patterns of experience in Southern Africa, South East Asia and India, East Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, and the Americas. It concludes with a sustained analysis of the International System -- the functioning of international organizations and the global role of money and trade.

In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War occasioned many reflections on the place of science and technology in the conflict. That the war ended with Allied victory in the Pacific theatre, inevitably focussed attention upon the Pacific region, and particularly upon the Manhattan project and its outcome. It was in the Pacific that Western physics and engineering gave birth to the Atomic Age. However, the Pacific war had also proved a testing time, and a testing space, for other disciplines and institutions. Extreme environments and opemtional distances, and the fundamental demands of logistics, required the Allies and the Japanese to innovate many scientific and technological practices. Just as medicine and botany were called upon to fight tropical diseases and insect pests, so engineers, anthropol ogists and geographers were called upon to understand local conditions and cli mates, and to work with local peoples whose traditional lives were changed forever by the experience. At the same time, the war played midwife to a host of new de velopments, not least in scientific intelligence and in chemical and biological weapons, which were to acquire far greater importance after 1945.