Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America's Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia

The United States had many weapons to use against the Soviet Union—from missiles to development aid to blue jeans and cans of Coca Cola. Among the most important were what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “spiritual weapons,” by which he meant the mobilization of religious communities against communism. The important and growing literature on Cold War religion focuses on Christianity and Europe. Eugene Ford's Cold War Monks is a welcome addition to this scholarship because of its sustained focus on Buddhism. It is also a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Cold War studies, which is shifting the focus away from the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union to understand the Cold War globally. Ford's focus is primarily on Thailand, with substantial sections as well on Vietnam and Cambodia. He argues that the Cold War forced Thai Buddhism away from “its closed, indeed closeted, approach to the world outside Thailand” to become “more diverse, more political, and more internationalized under Cold War pressures” (p. 2). Ford is also attentive to the evolving U.S. foreign policy toward Buddhism in Southeast Asia from the 1940s to the 1970s.