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Abstract
This dissertation examines the transformations of US military-building efforts in Asian states in the early Cold War, centering on the disputes, challenges, compromises, and paradoxes that emerged from the day-to-day work of global power. After WWII and through the 1950s, US military advisors intervened in a decolonizing Cold War Asian landscape, sketching a hierarchy of military capability that categorized their Asian allies in order to create a global security perimeter that arced from South Korea and Japan through Southeast Asia to Pakistan. Sparked by the Korean War, I argue that US military-building programs throughout Asia served as the bedrock for an infrastructure of American global power. Military advisors eventually became encased in a professional ecosystem that affirmed axioms of flexibility, intercultural cooperation, and reducing one’s responsibility for the actions of the soldiers that they advised and armed. Such a conclusion was the result of years of controversies involving questions of race, culture, modernization, and soldiering, and a retroactive desire to align the motivations of over a decade of US military aid with the actions of their partners. Through an examination of the everyday experiences of military advising and international military training, this dissertation identifies the rise of a US security architecture sustained by a logic of militarization rather than Americanization, supported by a post-hoc language of cultural relativism that sought to localize American military models and ultimately could rationalize the deviations of US-trained militaries from imagined US ideals.
Providing a bottom-up analysis of a tapestry of American and Asian actors—from American intellectuals, US advisors, Asian officers, local American hosts, and future coup d’etat leaders—this dissertation intervenes in the wider scholarly literature of the United States in the World by pinpointing how the site of interpersonal relationships and the everyday experience of military-building could cumulatively produce a novel form of global power. That form of power was the result of the conflicts which erupted when initial American desires to maximize control met the reality of local agency. Situated at the intersection between the history of US empire and the Cold War, this project also investigates the ambition of worldmaking, the impact of racial formation, and the transformation of cultural forms which complicated and yet made possible the creation of an American defense perimeter in Asia. I position military assistance as a globalizing process, supporting a global chain of militaries and military officers who were socialized with one another and interlinked by American security interests. At a critical stage after WWII, running alongside the emergence of permanent American imperial and security structures that would structure world affairs for the rest of the twentieth century, US military advising and assistance laid the foundations for the expansion of American global power and actualized an enduring mode of low-cost, low-responsibility aid on which the United States would rely to sustain its empire.
This dissertation employs interdisciplinary methods, drawing together international history, the analysis of the everyday, the imperial turn, and postcolonial studies in order to analyze a rich set of archival records from personal papers, underexamined studies and essays, Chinese- and Korean- language memoirs, newspapers, unit reports, and the vast paperwork produced by a global military bureaucracy. It underlines the linkage between cultural forms and militarization, the rapid evolution of American modes of power from the bottom-up, and the iterative process by which the United States was able to achieve its ambitions of creating a global security architecture while making sense of the dynamic, fundamentally uncontrollable networks it had created.