Handbook on the United States in Asia - Managing Hegemonic Decline Retaining Influence in the Trump Era

For those of us who work in policy, or academia, and want to produce policy relevant research or contemporary strategic affairs commentary, it’s so often the case that the need for a precise date or dollar figure leads to an unwanted trawl of the internet along with all its distractions. Andrew Tan’s new volume relieves one of that burden, instead offering the reader a compressed, succinct account of developments in the Asia-Pacific region with regard to its still most powerful and consequential player, the United States. This very engaging volume is one that many will find fills a valuable niche on the bookshelf. Besides the ready access to facts and figures, it offers its reader, in readable narrative prose, a useful and coherent account of the past few years’ events that many of us have watched unfold in news clips and tweets, straddling the end of Obama and his Pivot and the arrival of Trump and his unilateralism. It also offers a series of interesting vignettes and deep dives, whether they be Andrea Benvenuti’s reprise of how the outcomes of World War Two and the onset of the Cold War drew the United States ever more deeply into an Asian presence, or Pichamon Yeophantong’s quick survey of Southeast Asian attitudes to the United States.