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Chapter 1 The Foundations of Containment Behold, I have set before thee an open door and no man can shut it. —Rev. 2:8 (AV) Japan professed belief in the open door policy . . . but the time . . . has come when Japan can disclose her real policy, that of exclusion. —George Bronson Rea (1916) George Bronson Rea made a living off the Open Door. First, in 1905, as the founder of the Far Eastern Review, he championed American access to the China market. Later, as an adviser to the government of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, he championed Tokyo’s dominance in Northeast Asia. While Rea clearly abandoned his allegiance to the Open Door, America never did. During the Progressive Era, long before Rea turned apologist for the Japanese, his career and America’s defense of the Open Door paralleled one another. Rea launched his Far Eastern Review in 1905, the same year that Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated the American containment of Japan. A decade later, he penned his essay “Closing the Open Door,” which highlighted Japan’s wartime expansion and challenged America to defend China and its rights there. While Rea correctly drew attention to the threat that Japan posed to both China and America, he need not have worried about America’s commitment to the Open Door.1 By 1916, three very different presidents had worked to contain Japanese expansion and protect China. Theodore Roosevelt nurtured the balance of power and employed diplomacy and deterrence in near equal measure, while Taft relied primarily on America’s financial clout. While Wilson abhorred both military deterrence and dollar diplomacy, his search for a means to contain Japan eventually led him to embrace economic coercion, Roosevelt’s policy of diplomatic engagement, and Taft’s investment diplomacy. These differing approaches to limiting Japanese expansion were no doubt conditioned by these presidents’ more general approach to American diplomacy and their particular conception of Japan. Whereas Roosevelt did not 14 The Currents of War flinch from projecting American power and using it to bend weaker states to America’s will, Taft abhorred the use of force and instead preferred the rule of law and the power of the dollar. Wilson, who sought to chart a nobler course for American diplomacy, encountered both the greatest obstacles and in the end the most profound disillusionment. Roosevelt laid the groundwork for America’s containment of Japan and possessed a view of that nation shaped by reality but not warped by unreasonable fear. He recognized that, while Japan had arrived on the international stage late, it was a regional power and therefore possessed, as did the Russians, English, and French, a clearly defined, if not openly acknowledged, sphere of influence. This realism contributed to Roosevelt’s successful containment. Neither extreme fear nor extreme prejudice shaped Taft’s view of Japan, yet the strains of commercial competition led him to see Japan as an adversary that like the other great powers in Asia could legitimately be forced from its sphere by American capital. For these reasons, neither containment nor Japanese-American relations fared particularly well during his tenure. For Wilson, Japan was a particularly troublesome adversary in that Tokyo was both a commercial and a military rival that also opposed the president’s American-led diplomatic revolution. Despite the chaos that engulfed the world during Wilson’s two terms, his containment of Japan was remarkably successful. Despite their profound differences, all three leaders accepted the inherited wisdom of the nineteenth century, which emphasized that the United States must preserve the Open Door to China. Each administration searched for the Open Door’s exact meaning as well as the best means for protecting it, but neither Roosevelt nor Taft nor Wilson ever seriously questioned the long-term mission of containing Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland. Theodore Roosevelt and the Origins of Containment Theodore Roosevelt laid the foundation for the successful containment of Japan in the midst of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, while Tokyo’s modern armed forces laid waste to Russian military power. Following the American-brokered Portsmouth Treaty, which ended the war, the traditionally amiable Japanese-American relationship suddenly turned adversarial as Americans saw Japan replacing Russia as the primary threat to the Open Door. After Portsmouth, Roosevelt the peacemaker now worked to contain Japan. During the remainder of his second term, the president successfully limited Japanese expansion by nurturing the balance of power and employing a combination of military deterrence and diplomatic engagement. Vir- [3.141.8...

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