Post-War Burma’s Neutralism against Its Relations with Great Britain and the United States (1948–1962)

The article traces how the neutralist foreign policy of independent Burma was applied towards the British and American actors in the cold war theatre of Southeast Asia. The Burmese government of U Nu, threatened by insurgencies, approached the Anglo-Saxon powers to seek financial and military assistance provided there were no strings attached. The British, former colonial overlords of Burma looking to maintain leverage in the region, initially inspired distrust, but their tactful treatment of Burma’s neutralism opened the way to long-term cooperation already in the early 1950s, while Washington, which came to pursue the interventionist policy of ‘containment’ in Indochina, alienated Rangoon by affixing political conditions to material aid and abetting the Kuomintang occupation of Burmese border regions. The KMT and communist guerrilla crises induced Rangoon to court Beijing, yet its ties with the West remained close throughout the period. This undermines the assumptions about communist leanings of neutralist states harboured in both camps of the cold war rivalry, and reveals Burma’s course of foreign relations as largely successful