"The Preeminent Power in the Pacific"

Michael J. Green currently chairs a department at Georgetown University but previously he served President George W. Bush as his special assistant and senior director for Asia on his National Security Staff. Motivating him to write this full-length study of U.S.-East Asian relations was his discovery that there was no "comprehensive historical study of American statecraft toward Asia as a whole that was more recent than Tyler Dennett's 1922 Americans in Eastern Asia" (p. xiii). His goal, however, was not to write a traditional survey text, but a "history of strategic thought on Asia" (p. xiv). Green challenges the position of many previous historians that the United States has had no "grand strategy" in Asia, arguing that it always has assessed threats and opportunities there and developed policies to achieve its goals. "In the aggregate," he asserts in his central thesis, "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" (p. 4). Using well-chosen quotations to fortify his conventional narrative style, Green substantiates with ease his essentially self-evident main argument.

In his introduction, Green contends that permanent "geographic challenges" in Asia "and the idiosyncrasies of American political ideology have created five tensions in the American strategic approach toward [the region] that reappear with striking predictability" (p. 6). First, for most of American history, U.S. leaders have minimized Asia and prioritized Europe, resulting in flawed policies. Second, discord over whether to follow a continental or a maritime approach for engaging Asia has led to policy "swings between Japan and China [that] have vexed attempts to execute a consistent American strategy" (p. 8). Third, the United States has been inconsistent in defining a line in Asia that it will defend against an adversary seeking hegemony in the region. Fourth, U.S. leaders have oscillated between championing the principles of self-determination and universality in extending democratic norms to Asia. Finally, advocates of free trade have opposed protectionism to foster commercial expansion in Asia. Choosing sides on this source of tension, Green asserts that "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" (p. 11).

Green sporadically references these five tensions in his description of U.S. involvement in Asia chronologically from the pioneering voyage of the Empress of China to Canton in 1784 until the end of Barack Obama's presidency. A brief summary introduces each of four parts, with the first titled "The Rise of the United States," which has three chapters providing thoughtful treatment of American leaders' strategic thinking about Asia from the Founding Fathers to Theodore Roosevelt. "The Founders' vision of an Empire of Liberty from coast to coast," he observes in the first chapter, "became intertwined with the more distant dream of a commercial empire in the Pacific" (p. 24). Discussion follows of the rising U.S. commercial, naval, and missionary activism in Asia before 1860, showing how John Jacob Astor initiated the process. Praising John Quincy Adams as "the nation's first notable grand strategist," he faults Caleb Cushing, the first U.S. envoy to China, for his "optimistic and idealistic American exceptionalism" (p. 27; p. 44). Insightful profiles of Humphrey Marshall, Peter Parker, and Matthew C. Perry show how these strategists "recognized the changing balance of power in the region and sought a more activist U.S. strategy to safeguard longer-term American interests" (p. 52).

Chapters two and three carry the story from 1860 to 1909. While historians will be familiar with Green's description of Secretary of State William H. Seward's territorial acquisitions, they should find interesting his discussion of how...