This ambitious study is the first to link together in a single integrated account the postwar interrelationships of all the rim nations of the Pacific Basin -- in East and Southeast Asia, Australia, North and South America and the Pacific islands. Major themes explored here are the creation of Japan's new economic order in the region; the United States' crusades against communism, real and imagined, in Asia and Latin America; nationalist struggles for independence against colonial rule; and the shifting patterns of conflict and co-operation between the rim states themselves.