Since its inception as a specialized UN agency in 1948, the WHO faced two significant crises. First, the organization had to grapple with Cold War tensions: notably ideological, political, and military rivalries between the US and the Soviet Union. Between 1949 and 1956, the USSR and their Eastern European allies withdrew from the WHO and cited irreconcilable differences with the US with respect to the state’s role in the provision of health services. Second, the nascent organization had to come to terms with crumbling colonial empires—particularly the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French—who were anxious to hold on to their colonial possessions. Yet, the WHO had to accommodate the aspirations of nationalist leaders of newly independent states, particularly India, Indonesia, Burma, and the Philippines, who linked public health to broader questions of national reconstruction in the aftermath of the Pacific War. The WHO settled on a strategy of decentralization or regionalization to strike a balance between the anxieties of colonial empires in Southeast Asia and the needs of newly independent states. Between 1948 and 1951, the organization devolved its activities in Southeast Asia to the WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia (SEARO) and the WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific (WPRO). The activities of both regional offices symbolized a conspicuous shift from the WHO’s broader social medicine mandate to vertical disease eradication campaigns against malaria, tuberculosis, and yaws. These campaigns symbolized the organization’s technical and seemingly apolitical orientation.