A Troubling Tale Brilliantly Told

Rarely in policy studies does a book come along that merits the adjective "masterly": Michael Green's By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 is one such title. Exceeding 700 pages in length, it traces in insightful, lucid prose the history of the United States' engagement with the Indo-Pacific region—to use a contemporary term popularized by the Trump administration. As Green himself notes, the rarity of his work is somewhat puzzling, given that the Asian "rimland" has been strategically relevant, if not important, to the United States since at least the early twentieth century. Yet analyses that treat the region in an integrated fashion have indeed been scarce. The big exception here, of course, has been the oeuvre produced by theorists of classical geopolitics. The greatest names in the discipline, Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman, understood and, in a manner of speaking, debated the significance of the region for world politics. But their contributions hinged more on the understanding of particular spatial relationships than the historical interactions between specific states (see pp. 208–9).

When the latter have come into focus, the vast majority of work has centered on studies of specific bilateral ties, such as U.S.-Japan, U.S.-China, U.S.-Korea, and, more recently, U.S.-India relations. Detailing the broader expanse of U.S. engagement with Asia, or even rimland Asia, as a whole has proved to be more elusive. In part, the difficulties are methodological because the political construction of Asia is arguably a colonial invention. But the academic predilection, especially in the United States, for detailed but narrow analysis is equally to blame. And the demands of political necessity, however transient, have only reinforced these other constraints. Thus, for much of the early Cold War, U.S. policy focused largely on Northeast Asia, with Southeast Asia functioning mainly as a geopolitical periphery, even though Washington was consumed in a costly, decade-long war there. All told, then, a variety of pressures converged to make an integrated vision of the Asian rimland difficult, and the fragmentation in U.S. strategy during the Cold War only strengthened the analytical neglect.

By More Than Providence, therefore, is exceptionally relevant because it appears at a time when the previously discrete political segments of the Asian coast are linked together in unprecedented ways. This entwining is owed partly to exogenous variables such as technology—the information and communications and the transportation revolutions, in particular—but it is also driven by the most significant geopolitical development of our time: the rise of China as a new global power. China's recrudescence promises to integrate not merely the rimland but all continental Asia, if the Belt and Road Initiative bears fruit in the manner hoped for by the country's leadership. The necessity for a coherent U.S. strategy toward Asia as a whole—both its continental and its maritime dimensions—is therefore imperative. Although Green's book focuses mainly on the latter, it is nonetheless remarkable because it does intellectual justice to at least one important half of the challenge. Moreover, it impressively connects the evolution of U.S. relations with key regional powers to the fundamental transformations in larger U.S. strategy, especially the great shifts in maritime strategy that have occurred since the mid-nineteenth century, thus underscoring how the United States' engagement with Asia has been inextricably intertwined with its rise as a global power.

A sound policy toward this region will prove elusive if it is not anchored in a robust ideational foundation. Green sets out to provide this foundation, in part because such an undertaking has been conspicuous only by its exceptionalism. The closest work to this one in recent years has been Bruce Cumings's magisterial Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. But while Cumings examines how the United States and its policies shaped the Pacific edge of Asia, he focuses even more deeply on how domestic politics drove, and were driven by, the United States' Pacific engagements. As a result, the analysis of interactions between the...