By More Than Providence, by Michael J. Green (introduction)

By

MORE Than

PROVIDENCE

G R A N D ST R AT EGY A N D A M E R IC A N P O W E R I N T H E A S I A PAC I F I C S I N C E 1 7 8 3

MICHAEL J. GREEN

IN T R ODUC T ION

A

s China reasserts its power, and as smaller states in Asia bristle and hedge, Americans are engaging in a lively debate about America’s grand strategy toward Asia. Some evoke containment of the Soviet Union or the logic of Carl von Clausewitz to propose new competitive strategies toward Beijing.1 Others draw on the analogies of the First World War or the “Thucydidean trap” of the Peloponnesian Wars to argue for greater accommodation of a rising China.2 These European models of strategy offer important insights, but entirely missing from the debate is the more impor tant consideration of America’s own history of statecraft toward Asia and the Pacific. How did the United States become a Pacific power?

What are the roots of our strategy today? And why do we have a stake in Asia’s future? These are the questions that must be answered if we are to construct an enduring American grand strategy for the Asian Century and the rise of China.

For over two centuries, Americans have been tied to the Pacific by commerce, faith, geography, and self-defense. Over that time, Americans have overcome bids for regional hegemony in Asia from the European powers, imperial Japan, and Soviet communism. Modern America’s preeminence in the Pacific was no accidental by-product of victory in the

2

INTRODUCTION

Second World War, as many cursory histories suggest. It has intellectual roots going back to the handful of New Englanders who first carried Bibles, ginseng, and visions of Pacific empire to the Far East.

Yet, surprisingly, there has not been a comprehensive treatment of American statecraft toward Asia as a region since Tyler Dennett’s 1922 study Americans in Eastern Asia.3 To be sure, there have been compelling histories of U.S. bilateral relations with China, Japan, and India.4 There have also been revisionist histories that have attempted to recast American diplomacy in the region around the themes of racism and economic imperialism or to place American encounters with Asia in a larger cultural context.5 However, the roots of modern American strategic thought on the Pacific have remained largely untouched for generations.6 In a way, this gap in strategic history is understandable. Modern historians tend to eschew human agency, which is strongly implied in any study of strategic intent. Indeed, there has long been skepticism about the ability of the United States to formulate or implement a grand strategy of any kind.

A grand strategy, after all, requires the deliberate assessment of threats and opportunities, and the measured application of ways and means to achieve national objectives in reference to those threats and opportunities. In contrast to military strategy, grand strategy must incorporate diplomatic, informational, military, and economic tools in a comprehensive approach in times of both peace and war. Then, of course, the strategy has to be implemented. Effective grand strategy requires discipline. There must be clear prioritization of strategic objectives, long-term goals must be distinguished from short-term goals, and vital interests must be differentiated from secondary interests.7 The distribution of power must be well understood, and flexibility must be preserved as the strategy encounters unforeseen challenges.8 National will and resources must be harnessed to a single purpose.

These are heavy demands on a democratic society. As Richard Betts points out, “The logic of strategy depends on clarity of preferences, explicitness of calculation, and consistency of choice. Democratic competition and consensus building work against all of these.”9 The American constitutional system of government creates enormous strengths for the United States in the international system: legitimizing government at home and abroad; regenerating national dynamism; attracting foreign talent and admiration; and binding other powers through the reassuring transparency and accessibility of our political process. But the Founders created a system that was designed to prevent

INTRODUCTION

3

precisely the kind of centralization of decision-making imagined by Thucydides, Clausewitz, and other classical strategic thinkers. The word “strategy” itself is derived from the Greek strategos—meaning “from the commander.” Yet American presidents do not always care for foreign policy strategies, and when they do, their visions may clash with those of career bureaucracies “focused on their own interests, habits, and urges,”10 secretaries of state who are skeptical of abstract theories,11 or a Congress jealous of its own prerogatives to approve treaties and declare war.12 Presidents’ racial or social prejudices, susceptibility to “groupthink,” or just plain incompetence can also distort the formulation and implementation of grand strategies.13 It is therefore no surprise that history is replete with observations about the futility of discovering or designing an American way of strategy. In Democracy in Amer ica, Alexis de Tocqueville observed: “A democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fi xed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience.”14 Alfred Thayer Mahan also lamented America’s “policy of isolation”15 at the end of the nineteenth century, and in 1943 Walter Lippmann criticized his fellow Americans’ “idealistic objections” to serious strategic thinking in his own time.16 In the 1950s, Robert Osgood complained of the historic American obsession with the “glimpse of Utopia,” and after the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger warned that foreign policy intellectuals had “retreated from the field of strategy.”17 Many contemporary foreign policy scholars have echoed Les Gelb’s admonition in Power Rules (2009) that “there is nothing more central to the exercise of power than a good strategy, and the United States does not now have one.”18 All of this leads diplomatic historian Walter McDougall to ask whether “grand strategy can be said to move a nation even when that nation’s fluctuating roster of mostly incompetent leaders are unsure as to why they do anything.” His answer is yes: “The historical record would seem to indicate, first, that the United States can and has embraced grand strategies (even during the eras once scorned as isolationist), second, that strategies based on realist premises have been mostly fruitful, and third, that strategies based on idealist premises have been mostly abortive.”19 “All countries have grand strategies, whether they know it or not,” explains Edward Luttwak in The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.

He adds: “That is inevitable because grand strategy is simply the level at

4

INTRODUCTION

which knowledge and persuasion, or in modern terms intelligence and diplomacy, interact with military strength to determine outcomes in a world of other states with their own ‘grand strategies.’ ”20 Or as Leon Trotsky is sometimes reputed to have said, “You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.”

American grand strategy has always flowed organically from the republic’s values and geographic circumstances. It may at times reside in the minds of a close-knit group of elites, such as those around John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, or Richard Nixon, but never be clearly articulated as such. It may, in other periods, involve “linking and bringing together a series of processes and decisions spanning years,” as Paul Bracken argues, and not “for someone in Washington to posit a grand strategy and then recruit experts to execute it.”21 Ultimately, as Betts concedes, American strategy may be a “metaprocess that links ends and means effectively but not efficiently.”22 The metaprocess Betts describes becomes clearer in a historical survey that traces concepts chronologically—“thinking in time” rather than focusing on individual case studies that inevitably bring human foibles to the fore.23 A history of any nation’s grand strategy must also be more than just an intellectual history. Statecraft, war, and trade are where the wheat and chaff of strategic debates are sorted out over time. Concepts are contested and tested, and they submerge and reemerge. Over time, some principles become more enduring than others do. These come to define a nation’s strategic culture.

Over the course of two hundred years, the United States has in fact developed a distinctive strategic approach toward Asia and the Pacific.

There have been numerous instances of hy pocrisy, inconsistency, and insufficient harnessing of national will and means. There have been strategic miscalculations—particularly before Pearl Harbor, on the Yalu River, and in Vietnam. In the aggregate, however, the United States has emerged as the preeminent power in the Pacific not by providence alone but through the effective (if not always efficient) application of military, diplomatic, economic, and ideational tools of national power to the problems of Asia.

Of course, the terms of American engagement with Asia have been transformed with the technological revolutions that replaced sail with steam, steam with internal combustion, and then internal combustion with jets, ballistic missiles, and eventually cyberspace. The political, social, and economic revolutions of the past two centuries, particu-

INTRODUCTION

5

larly nationalism, communism, and globalization, have also created an American relationship with Asia and the Pacific that would have been unrecognizable to the early architects of American engagement with the region.

Yet Asia also has presented a consistent set of geostrategic challenges that have shaped an American way of strategizing toward the region. Asia has always been a region defined by hierarchy; by the waxing and waning of the Sinocentric order; by a geography that surrounds China with smaller peripheral states and offshore island chains and separates the Asian continent from the West Coast of the United States with a vast ocean spanning 7,000 miles; where sources of political legitimacy have constantly been contested as empires have collapsed and arisen; and where economic development has always been diverse and uneven. As military historian Williamson Murray notes, these are the kinds of factors that become the building blocks of a nation’s strategic culture: “Geography helps determine whether a given polity will find itself relatively free from threat or surrounded by potential adversaries. Historical experience creates preconceptions about the nature of war and politics and may generate irresistible strategic imperatives. And ideology and culture shape the course of decision-makers and their societies in both conscious and unconscious ways.”24 If there is one central theme in American strategic culture as it has applied to the Far East over time, it is that the United States will not tolerate any other power establishing exclusive hegemonic control over Asia or the Pacific. Put another way, for over two centuries, the national interest of the United States has been identified by key leaders as ensuring that the Pacific Ocean remains a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.

Early examples of this strategic impulse include Thomas Jefferson’s and then John Quincy Adams’s assertion of American primacy in the Pacific Northwest as America’s gateway to the Pacific; President John Tyler’s subsequent extension of the Monroe Doctrine to include Hawaii; and William McKinley’s decisions to annex Hawaii and to remain in the Philippines after European powers sought to exploit the vacuum left by Spain’s defeat. In more recent history, challenges to U.S. preeminence in the region have prompted external balancing, using the China card to check Soviet expansion, or the Japan and India cards to maintain a favorable strategic equilibrium vis-à-vis China’s rise. When the United States has been attacked, as John Lewis Gaddis argues in Surprise, Security, and

6

INTRODUCTION

the American Experience (2003), the U.S. response has been to seek safety by “expanding and not contracting its sphere of responsibilities.”25 This is what happened after Pearl Harbor and after the North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950. Scholars have sometimes cast these various periods of expansion as either economic imperialism or offensive realism— and to be sure there were economic interests at stake and chauvinism at play—but the organizing strategic concepts in each case ultimately reflected defensive realism, which is to say that they were first and foremost responses to threats to American access and security in the region.26 Yet, if the United States has repeatedly embraced strategies to block hegemons and ensure access across the Pacific, it has also struggled to identify the ways and means of those strategies. The enduring geographic challenges of the region and the idiosyncrasies of American political ideology have created five tensions in the American strategic approach toward Asia that reappear with striking predictability.

Europe Versus Asia. America’s strategy toward Asia derives from global priorities, and for most of American history, it was Europe rather than Asia that remained the region of greatest importance to the nation’s elite.

After independence, European powers threatened to isolate and contain the new republic on the eastern seaboard, while the Royal Navy dominated the Atlantic. Then, in the first half of the twentieth century, American leaders came to see the preservation of British power in Europe as the sine qua non for an open liberal order as America rose to global prominence. That pattern repeated during the Cold War, when the Fulda Gap became the central front against Soviet expansion and drew the greatest diplomatic and military resources, even as most of the actual fighting against Communist forces took place in the Far East.

None of this is to say, however, that the American people are more isolationist toward Asia than toward other regions of the world. In fact, the opposite is more often true: polls in 1941 showed that Americans were willing to risk war with Japan but not Germany, and more recent polls show that Americans are far more willing to fight to defend Japan or South Korea than they are to intervene in Syria or go back into Iraq or Afghanistan.27 From the first encounter with Chinese merchants in Canton in 1784, Americans developed a pride of place in the Far East that they would never have in the Old Country, despite their stronger hereditary ties across the Atlantic. After all, it was Europe, not the Pacific or the Caribbean, that was the focus of George Washington’s famous admonition to “avoid foreign entanglements.” For Americans, the Pacific has been the

INTRODUCTION

7

theater of future aspirations; as Japan scholar Edwin O. Reischauer wrote in 1968, “We have a great stake in the future of Asia—a far greater stake than the Asia of today.”28 The same might have been said a century earlier by William Henry Seward. When American leaders have retained a disciplined focus on those long-term interests, Asia strategy has flowed logically from global strategy. When Asia strategy has been an afterthought to exigencies in Europe or the Middle East, American policy in the region has proven deeply flawed.

Continental Versus Maritime/China Versus Japan. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Englishman Sir Halford Mackinder argued that the nation that controlled the Eurasian heartland would achieve eventual hegemony in the international system, whereas American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan posited that security and hegemony depended on control of the seas.29 As a maritime power in the Pacific, it has always been natural for the United States to anchor its engagement of the region on Japan, as the earliest U.S. naval officers active in the region argued back to Washington. Yet, historically, Asian regional order has been centered on China and the continent. How then does a maritime power shape strategic events on the continent from offshore? As Athens found in confronting Sparta, and the United States learned in Vietnam, challenging continental powers on their own turf from offshore can be disastrous.30 On the other hand, pursuit of a geostrategic condominium with continental China risks undercutting the offshore island bastion offered by Japan, since China would seek to subvert Japan and the island chain under its historic hegemony.

This fundamental tension between the Mackinder and Mahan views of geography has been exacerbated in American statecraft by the tendency of certain leaders to find greater affi nity with either Japan or China. Commodore Matthew Perry, Mahan, and Theodore Roosevelt all saw Japan as the modernizing example that would help tame the quasimedieval Slavs and Chinese on the continent. Postwar veterans of the maritime ser vices such as George Shultz and Richard Armitage also looked to Japan as the geographic and ideational anchor for America in Asia. In contrast, continentalists such as Humphrey Marshall (more on him later), the American commissioner to China in the 1850s, or Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the modern era, have tended to see China as a more natu ral partner for realizing a favorable balance of power in the Mackinder tradition. China has also evoked great romance for Americans, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose own family

8

INTRODUCTION

was in the China trade for over a century, like many American elites in the Northeast. From the earliest decades of American engagement across the Pacific, the swings between Japan and China have vexed attempts to execute a consistent American strategy.

Defining the Forward Defense Line. Closely related to the continental/ maritime tension and the pressures of Eurocentrism has been the question of where to draw the American defensive line against potential hegemonic aspirants in Asia. In the 1820s, the United States drew that line in the Pacific Northwest, and in the 1840s, at Hawaii, though the U.S. Navy was in no position to enforce either defense line at the time. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the goal became establishment of coaling stations running laterally across the Pacific to the China coast. After the United States fi nally achieved that goal with the annexation of Hawaii, the Philippines, and Guam at the turn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt discovered a new vulnerability, since Japan would now be in a position to attack U.S. forces in the Philippines from home bases nearby as the U.S. Navy was forced to rush across the vast Pacific to their defense. From 1907 to 1941, U.S. naval strategists struggled with this problem as they drafted and redrafted War Plan Orange, ultimately defeating Japan in a costly island-hopping campaign across the Central and Southwest Pacific.

After the war, the Truman administration drew the American defensive line very deliberately between the offshore island chain and the continent, including Japan but excluding South Korea—which the North then promptly attacked. In response, the United States moved the defensive line to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the Korean Peninsula while creeping forward onto continental Southeast Asia until the costs of escalation in Vietnam prompted Nixon in 1969 to announce a new “Guam Doctrine,” which caused the U.S. line to recede again. When the U.S. offshore island position was threatened by a massive Soviet military buildup in the Far East a decade later, Ronald Reagan responded with an aggressive maritime strategy that pushed the Soviet fleet back into the Sea of Okhotsk from bases in Japan. Today, the American forward presence in the Western Pacific is again being challenged by China’s military buildup and coercive claims to territories within the First Island Chain—and American strategists are debating whether the United States should be risking war over “rocks” in the South China Sea, as one administration official put it in 2012.

INTRODUCTION

9

Over the course of this history, Americans have learned that the Pacific Ocean does not provide sanctuary against threats emanating from the Eurasian heartland if the United States itself is not holding the line at the Western Pacific. But defi ning the location of the forward defense line always entails costs and risks that each president has calculated differently—and at times unadvisedly.

Self-Determination Versus Universal Values. It is common for proponents of grand strategy who are steeped in the neorealist traditions of international relations theory to dismiss ideational dimensions of foreign policy as a distraction from vital interests.31 The fact is, however, that promotion of democratic norms has always been a central element in American foreign policy strategy, not simply because of egoism or idealism but because of the clear strategic advantages of maintaining a favorable ideational balance of power in which like-minded states reinforce American influence, access, and security. This has been particularly true in Asia, where questions of political legitimacy and national identity were critical determinants of what kind of regional order would replace the Qing (then known as the Ching) empire and then the European and Japanese empires.

From the moment Thomas Jefferson cast his gaze toward the Pacific Northwest and argued for the establishment of a like-minded republic to prevent European encroachment, expanding the democratic space has been essential to American strategy across the Pacific.

In practice, however, longer-term support for democratic norms often conflicts with immediate demands for commercial access or national defense. Moreover, there is an inherent tension in two key principles embodied in the American Revolution with respect to democracy: selfdetermination and universality. At times, American diplomacy in Asia has been premised on self-determination, as American diplomats championed their anti-imperialism and their support for the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other states (a staple of American declaratory policy in the region until the Carter administration). At other times, American diplomacy has expressed the universalist vision of Thomas Paine, who foresaw that the American Revolution would bring “harbingers of a new world order, creating forms of governance and commerce that would appeal to peoples everywhere and change the course of human history.�32 These two visions of how to expand the democratic space have collided throughout the history of American statecraft in Asia. During the

10

INTRODUCTION

1839–1842 Opium Wars, for example, prominent American statesmen debated whether the national interest lay with China’s attempt to resist European imperialism or Britain’s attempt to impose universal “Christian” values of governance and commerce on a backward China. In the early years of the Second World War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt so feared Japan’s appeal as a champion of anti-imperialism in Asia that he sent proxies across the region to call for an end to European colonialism after the war, to Winston Churchill’s great annoyance. During the Cold War, American governments tolerated authoritarianism in Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan in order to block communist expansion in Asia. Jimmy Car ter tried to reverse this policy but quickly retreated in the face of renewed Soviet expansion. Reagan then returned to a policy of supporting authoritarian anticommunist regimes, but he soon became an advocate for democratic transitions in all three countries when it became apparent that poor governance and illegitimacy opened them to even greater communist advances.

The real strategic tension, in other words, is not between “interests” and “idealism” but between the United States’ two foundational norms of self-determination and universality. Over time, the democratic space in Asia has expanded dramatically, which is a testament to the importance that leaders from Jefferson to Reagan placed on the issue in American approaches to the Pacific and the powerful example of individual liberty.

In the immediacy of great-power competition in Asia, however, consistency has proven difficult—and inconsistency has confused friends and adversaries alike.

Protectionism Versus Free Trade. Since the profitable voyage of the Empress of China from New York to Canton (Guangzhou) in 1784, trade has dominated American strategic thought toward Asia. Yet here also one finds an inherent tension in American statecraft. The word “protectionism” today carries strong negative connotations, but for the first 150 years of the Unites States, those in the Northeast most actively promoting trade with Asia were also strong advocates of a high tariff at home to protect native industries against British competition. Americans were initially drawn to Asia not to support universal free trade but instead to promote their right to trade in a world other wise dominated by British imperial preferences.33 Toward the end of the century, American strategists noticed that reciprocal tariff reduction agreements with Hawaii signed in 1875 had bound the islands to the United States economically and strategically. Mahan began to argue that American leadership in

INTRODUCTION

11

the region would increasingly depend on the further reduction of tariffs with other nations so as to bind them to the United States as well—a notion that put him at odds with his friend Theodore Roosevelt, a good Republican and passionate advocate of the tariff.

After the disastrous consequences of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs and prewar protectionism, Americans constructed a postwar global order that embodied the principle of universal free trade in the agreements at Bretton Woods.34 There was at that point little tension between the principles of free trade and the right to trade. In contemporary theoretical terms, Americans were able to reinforce the hegemonic stability identified by Mahan as other states were drawn to the open U.S. market but simultaneously pursue relative gains over competitors in Europe and Japan by opening erstwhile colonies and trading blocks to American companies invigorated by wartime production.35 By the 1960s, however, Japan had begun to outcompete American textile firms, and voices of protectionism reemerged in the U.S. Congress. The battle lines between protectionism and free trade have been drawn and redrawn in American domestic politics ever since—from textiles to consumer electronics, autos, and aerospace. Protectionists have never regained the upper hand, because successive administrations have repeatedly negotiated new bilateral, regional, and global trade agreements that simultaneously reinforce hegemonic stability and Americans’ right to trade. However, when new administrations have failed to make the expansion of trade a central pillar of their strategic approach to Asia, they have invariably lost ground in terms of both economic and security interests in the region.

Over the course of more than two centuries of engaging Asia, American statesmen have struggled to fi nd the right balance between each of these five tensions. American strategy has been most successful when applying all the instruments of national power, since these reflect foundational American interests and values: protecting the nation and its citizens against harm, expanding economic access and opportunity, and promoting democratic values. As Reischauer put it succinctly in 1955: The military and economic arms of policy are in a sense purely subsidiary to the ideological. Through the military arm we can defend some selected spots, but this does us more harm than good if the people in those areas do not elect to use the time bought by our blood to work toward development of a healthy democracy. Through economic aid

12

INTRODUCTION

we can give the people of an Asian country a better fighting chance to develop democratic institutions, but our economic aid, if they so decide, could be used with equal effectiveness to lay the foundations of a totalitarian regime. Without the support of the military and economic arms, our ideological efforts might prove entirely ineffective, but without the ideological side the other two become almost meaningless.36

Of course, the United States has not consistently applied the military, economic, and ideological arms of policy over the course of history, but from those failings, there are valuable lessons for the present.

Organ ization of the Book This book begins by tracing the evolution of American strategy toward Asia and the Pacific at the birth of the republic, when merchants, explorers, and missionaries discovered the core truths of the region and from that early stage began to defi ne how the United States could someday establish a maritime and commercial position of preeminence. The book then explains the growth of those early “seeds of strategy” over four systemic challenges to the preservation of a trans-Pacific order linking Asia to the United States: (1) the rise of the United States in the nineteenth century amid growing imperial competition from the European powers and the collapse of Sinocentrism; (2) the rise of Japan as European power collapsed, and the United States stood almost alone against a new hegemonic challenger in the region; (3) the rise of the Soviets as victory over Japan gave way to a new contest for supremacy; and (4) the rise of China, as Sinocentric visions of regional order have returned in a new collision with the rules-based order established by the United States.

Each of these four periods is divided into separate chapters that examine the consolidation of strategic concepts in response to changing distributions of power.37 Part 1, The Rise of the United States, begins in chapter 1 (“A Theatre for the Exercise of the Most Ambitious Intellect”) with the first engagement with the Far East and the consolidation of the North American continent to the West Coast. Chapter 2 (“How Sublime the Pacific Part Assigned to Us”) describes how the United States developed the conceptual, diplomatic, military, and economic tools for expansion into the Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 (“I Wish to See the

INTRODUCTION

13

United States the Dominant Power on the Shores of the Pacific”) unbundles the consolidation of American grand strategy in the Pacific in the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

Part 2, The Rise of Japan, begins in chapter 4 (“Leave the Door Open, Rehabilitate China, and Satisfy Japan”) with American efforts to sustain regional stability through the Open Door policy with China, culminating in the multilateral “Washington Naval Treaties” of the 1920s. Chapter 5 (“Between Non-resistance and Coercion”) explores the panicked strategic debate that emerged as that same treaty system collapsed in the 1930s.

Chapter 6 (“We Have Got to Dominate the Pacific”) demonstrates how the lessons of the first half of the twentieth century shaped the grand strategy of the Pacific war and set the stage for the contest for regional supremacy that would follow.

Part 3, The Rise of the Soviets, begins in chapter 7 (“The Overall Effect Is to Enlarge Our Strategic Frontier”) as the United States adjusted to the Cold War by establishing a network of bilateral alliances and a forward military presence in the Western Pacific. Chapter 8 (“Anyone Who Isn’t Confused Really Doesn’t Understand the Situation”) explains how that expanded network of alliances and forward presence generally stopped communist expansion but then stumbled in Vietnam. Chapter 9 (“An Even Balance”) covers Nixon’s effort to restore a favorable strategic equilibrium in the region through opening up to China. Chapter 10 (“The President Cannot Make Any Weak Moves”) dissects Carter’s effort to reverse Nixon’s strategies and then his desperate but consequential return to the China card as the Soviets resumed their expansion in Asia. Chapter 11 (“To Contain and Over Time Reverse”) concludes the Cold War strategies by examining how Reagan integrated military, economic, and ideational tools to undercut the pillars of Soviet power in the Far East and prepare the way for victory in the Cold War. Part 4, The Rise of China, begins with chapter 12 (“The Key to Our Security and Our Prosperity Lies in the Vitality of Those Relationships”), as George H. W. Bush sought to maintain the pillars of American strategic preeminence in the Pacific at a time of uncertainty about the very purpose of American power after the Cold War. Chapter 13 (“Engage and Balance”) describes Bill Clinton’s exploration of new strategic concepts and his eventual return to an alliance-centered strategy of engaging and balancing a suddenly unpredictable China in Asia. Chapter 14 (“A Balance of Power That Favors Freedom”) explains how George W. Bush attempted to solidify and expand that framework while simultaneously

14

INTRODUCTION

contending with the military and diplomatic challenges of the War on Terror. Chapter 15 (“The Pivot”) ends the chronology by reviewing the promise and pitfalls of Barack Obama’s pledge to make the Asia-Pacific region the centerpiece of American foreign policy going forward.

As a whole, the chapters form a continuous evolution of strategic thought as concepts are tested, recede from national debate, and then reemerge and recombine in times of peril to form the core of a new strategic consensus. Much of the time, there is drift and confusion, even as the core elements of a new strategic approach are quietly taking root. The five tensions discussed earlier are recurring themes, but at key moments the United States has overcome these tensions to develop and execute an effective strategy in the Pacific. And with the exception of the interwar years and perhaps Vietnam, this is a story of successful outcomes. The book concludes with a brief consideration of how policymakers can apply these lessons to the formulation of a grand strategy going forward.

One final definition is impor tant, though close to impossible to explain: What is Asia? There was no concept of “Asia” before the Europeans created one, only the Chinese empire and those states on the periphery.

Even today, the question is difficult to answer. For Chinese strategists, the United States, Australia, and India are considered extraregional powers.

In Delhi, there is increasing reference to the Indo-Pacific region, whereas Canberra and Washington refer to their membership in the Asia-Pacific region. In Tokyo, the definition of Asia shifts depending on whether the government in power seeks to expand U.S.-Japan alliance cooperation in the region or empower Japanese diplomacy free of dependence on the United States. No two foreign ministries in Asia structure their regional bureaus exactly the same way. In short, the definition of Asia usually reflects the identity and national interest of the government in question.

And so the geographic scope of Asia in this book will reflect the evolving American definitions of interests and national identity. At the beginning of the United States, Asia was called the East Indies, and the locus of interest was Canton, with the Pacific Northwest the anchor on the American continent. Northeast Asia remained thereafter the fulcrum of American geographic definitions of the region. Even after the United States annexed the Philippines, the strategic focus remained on Japan and China, not Southeast Asia, which was largely under European colonial control (and managed in the European Affairs offices of the State Department). In the Second World War, the region was defined by where the Allies fought against the outer reaches of the Japanese empire, and com-

INTRODUCTION

15

mands were divided into the Pacific Ocean Area (under Admiral Chester Nimitz), the Southwest Pacific Area (under General Douglas MacArthur), the China/Burma/India Theater (under General Joseph Stilwell), and later the British-led Southeast Asia Command (under Lord Louis Mountbatten). In the Cold War, Southeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula became more prominent in the strategies of containment as communist aggression spread. Today, most American strategists refer to the Asia-Pacific broadly but also consider India a critical part of the region’s future in terms of balancing China’s impact.

Does the United States have a grand strategy for Asia? The evidence often lies in how Americans have defined the region geographically— beginning with the first encounters of merchants, missionaries, and naval officers at the beginning of the republic.