Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power (review)

Much ink has been spilled in recent months regarding the American “pivot” to Asia. While there have been debates about whether the policy is anything new and whether the assurances made by a declining power are credible, this re-engagement has been broadly welcomed by regional elites. The US presence is routinely described as “positive” and “stabilizing”, and Washington is widely seen as a relatively “benign” hegemon.

Why is the United States viewed in such a positive light? In Hard Interests, Soft Illusions, Natasha Hamilton-Hart tackles a question that is rarely asked, exploring the interests and beliefs that underpin Southeast Asia’s alignment with Washington. She rejects the argument that state action is driven largely by systemic pressures such as the distribution of power or balance of threats. Rather, echoing the work of Subaltern Realists, Hamilton-Hart claims that, in Southeast Asia, there are good reasons to think “the motives that drive this alignment are located at the domestic level” (p. 20).

At the heart of the book are the “hard interests” of power holders and the “soft illusions” or beliefs of foreign policy-makers and practitioners. Beliefs about the positive role of the United States are not illusory, but neither can they be easily equated with “national interests”. As has been well documented, in many parts of the region the gap between elite views of Washington and popular opinion is striking.

The book starts with a discussion of the material interests of those who gained power as a consequence of US actions in Southeast Asia since World War Two. In a section entitled “The political economy of alignment”, Hamilton-Hart argues, “the winners who emerged from political struggles between the 1940s and the 1960s enjoyed American support because they pursued policies that were broadly in line with American preferences for capitalist development in the region” (p. 85). The author claims that the exercise of American power in Southeast Asia served two ends for regional elites: first, it helped them defeat potential rivals and opponents; second, it allowed them to “pay off supporters and in some cases to appropriate material gains individually” (p. 18).

But if the argument is grounded in political economy, the bigger claim is about the independent power of beliefs. The author argues that there is a particular alignment of material interest and ideological vision that has underpinned acceptance of American hegemony and is the condition for continued support for US “engagement” and “balancing” in the region today. The ideational basis of alignment is explored in two chapters that draw on a rich survey of the historical literature and seventy-four interviews with Southeast Asian policy-makers and practitioners. For America’s friends and partners in the region, the most common justification for viewing it as a “benign, stabilizing force” is its historical record (p. 88). Chapter Four examines the way that national histories have been written and interpreted to draw particular (largely positive) lessons about the United States and its role in the region. Three themes emerge: first, in non-Communist states, the spectre of Communism in past domestic conflicts is frequently invoked; second, external threats are described in a way that presents the United States as a protector; and finally “scant attention” is paid to the human casualties of past conflicts (p. 89). Country by country, the book examines the place of America in national narratives, from Singapore, where the Vietnam War is widely remembered (by an older generation in particular) as “buying time” for non-Communist Southeast Asia, to Vietnam, where rather than yielding the lesson the US is an “aggressive power” Hamilton-Hart argues the country’s historical experience is more “often invoked as teaching a lesson about China as an expansionist power” (p. 131). In non-Communist Southeast Asia these national histories are also frequently “sanitized”, with the human costs of past American actions — the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, support for anti-Communist purges — largely expunged...