This is an amazing blog – strangemaps.wordpress.com - containing images of old maps, along with interesting write-ups on the history behind most of maps. 

I especially like this old map of the Communist threat to east Asia as seen from Irkutsk, Russia.  According to the site, this map was from an issue of Time magazine published in 1952.  Back then, the mainstream media was interested in geopolitics from a US perspective, not the perspective of the international Left.

From the odd perspective of this map, it is obvious how important South Korea and eventually South Vietnam were in containing Communism during the Cold War. 

If the west had not defended South Korea from the Communist onslaught, the only free countries in the entire eastern half of the largest continent in the world would have been in the peninsula of southeast Asia. 

It makes the US decision in the early sixties to fight to keep South Vietnam free seem pragmatic, especially given the modern view of our involvement in southeast Asia as an example of America’s imperial over reach.