The US-Thai Alliance and Asian International Relations: History, Memory and Current Developments.

The US-Thai Alliance and Asian International Relations: History, Memory and Current Developments. By Gregory Raymond and John Blaxland. London, UK: Routledge, 2021. Softcover: 238pp.

When US Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Singapore and Vietnam in mid-2021 (Austin also stopped in the Philippines), officials in Thailand, Washington's oldest alliance partner, asked the Americans why they were bypassed. US officials have not publicly explained their decision, but the reason is likely related to the fact that Thai-US relations have been through a difficult patch in recent years and this has dented trust between the countries and weakened the alliance.

In The US-Thai Alliance and Asian International Relations: History, Memory and Current Developments, Gregory Raymond and John Blaxland analyse the complicated and sometimes tortured ties between the two countries, and how Bangkok has responded by embedding itself in multi-faceted relations with China and other Asian states. Part of the authors' analysis about the United States (and China) is based on surveys undertaken between 2015 and 2018 with some 1,800 respondents from various Thai military academies and staff colleges. The authors do not claim that their surveys were statistically representative of all Thai people, but rather use it as a prism to show what many senior Thai military officers think about the two superpowers.

Despite decades of US-Thai military cooperation dating back to the beginning of the Cold War, the two scholars found "significant distrust" (p. 67) of the United States among survey respondents. When Raymond and Blaxland asked about military threats, the majority said, "the United States was seen as a more likely military threat to Thailand than China" (p. 67). They determined no significant differences between respondents who had studied in the United States and those who had studied in other countries.

Tortured exchanges between Washington and Bangkok in the wake of the 2014 coup only partly explain these surprising results. The authors point out that even before the coup, a survey conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington found that among 11 Asia-Pacific nations (including China, Japan, India and Australia), Thais were the "least enthusiastic about US leadership" despite their longstanding treaty alliance.

Raymond and Blaxland contend that Thai memories of the Cold War--when Washington...

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