Haseman, John B. 1942-

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HASEMAN, John B. 1942-

PERSONAL:

Born July 16, 1942; son of Leonard L. (a career military officer) and Violet B. (a homemaker) Haseman. Education: University of Missouri, Columbia, B.A.; University of Kansas, M.A.; U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, M.M.A.S. (Master of Military Art and Science).

ADDRESSES:

Home—555 West Saddle Dr., Grand Junction, CO 81503; fax: 970-256-9421. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Consultant on Southeast Asian affairs. U.S. Army, division chief and training coordinator, U.S. embassy, Jakarta, Indonesia, 1978-81; assistant army attaché, Jakarta, 982-85; Washington, DC, office of the assistant chief of staff for intelligence, senior Southeast Asia analyst, 1985-86; Rangoon, Burma, defense attaché, 1987-90; Jakarta, defense attaché, 1990-94; attained rank of colonel.

MEMBER:

Foreign Area Officer Association, Military Officers of America Association, Association of the U.S. Army.

WRITINGS:

The Thai Resistance Movement during the Second World War, Northern Illinois University (De Kalb, IL), 1978, published as The Thai Resistance Movement during World War II, Silkworm Books (Chaingmai, Thailand), 2002.

(With Angel Rabasa) The Military and Democracy in Indonesia: Challenges, Politics, and Power, RAND Corporation (Santa Monica, CA), 2002.

Author of reports. Contributor to books, including Fragility and Crisis: Strategic Asia 2003-04; The Unravelling of Island Asia? Governmental, Communal, and Regional Instability, Bruce Vaughn, editor, Praeger Books (Westport, CT), 2002; and East Timor: Out of the Ashes, Crawford House (Adelaide, Australia). Contributor to periodicals, including Contemporary Southeast Asia, Jane's Defence Weekly, Jane's Intelligence Review, Joint Force Quarterly, Asian Survey, Jane's Sentinel, Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, Asia-Pacific Defense Forum, Asia Pacific Defence Reporter, Vietnam, and Southeast-Asian Affairs.

SIDELIGHTS:

During his thirty-year career in the U.S. Army, John B. Haseman spent eighteen years in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Burma, including ten years as a defense and army attaché. He is an expert on Southeast Asian political affairs and has written many reports and articles and contributed to volumes covering his area of expertise.

Haseman's The Thai Resistance Movement during the Second World War studies events following December 1941 when Marshal Phibun of Thailand agreed, without resistance, to allow Japan to use Thailand as a conduit to Burma and Malaya, and then declared war on the United States and Britain when he concluded that such a position would enable Japan to become all-powerful in Southeast Asia. Haseman shows how, in spite of this situation, pockets of the Thai elite refused to accept this presumption and declaration of war and instead aligned with the United States and Britain to set up an anti-Japanese resistance movement. By 1945, when the Allies were preparing to go forward from Burma to Malaya, Thailand, and Indo-China, the Thai resistance encompassed nearly the entire country, including nearly all of the region's political administration. When the war ended, Thailand was not only an enemy of the United States and Britain, but also, ironically, a de facto ally. Haseman follows events in considering how they affected postwar politics and Thailand's international position.

Carl A. Trocki wrote in the Journal of Asian Studies that Haseman's study "is chiefly based on memoirs of both Thai and European participants and on declassified U.S. government intelligence documents." He noted that Haseman contends that "the resistance became the government." "Haseman's only explanation for this change is that those leaders loyal to Phibun 'had been hampered in their support of the resistance by their kinship and patron ties to him,'" Trocki noted, adding that "This may have been true, but it does not say much for Phibun's 'support' of the resistance. The other and more intriguing question is that of the nature of this shift on the part of the Thai ruling establishment. Did the resistance really 'become the government,' or did just the opposite happen? It seems more likely that the government simply took over the resistance."

Clive Christie wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that Haseman "guides the reader through this complex story clearly and competently, but confines himself to the activities of the resistance itself, and in particular the guiding role played in it by the British and American covert action organizations, SOE [Special Operations Executive] and OSS [Office of Strategic Services]."

Pacific Affairs contributor Benjamin Batson noted that the study "does not, on the whole, radically alter the conventional picture of the Thai resistance movement, but rather fills in a wealth of detail lacking in earlier sketchy treatments. The major achievement is bringing together the various pieces of the overall picture into an integrated and balanced whole."

Haseman told CA: "I definitely write for a niche market, so my primary goal is to be up-to-date on the issues and prescient in my analysis. I hope those who read my work will be better informed on the issues, whether it's to make important geo-political policy decisions, inform their business knowledge in the region, or just to inform their minds."