Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

World War II was a watershed in American involvement in East Asia. Before Pearl Harbor, businessmen, missionaries, and independent diplomats favored passive and reactive US policies. But after 1945, the United States asserted its military power and political influence in East Asia in pursuit of regional hegemony. No longer satisfied with offering a model for emulation, postwar US policymakers believed that they had a special talent for restructuring the lives of liberated colonial people. To be sure, the reality of the Cold War in Europe was a powerful force behind the conviction of US leaders that an assertive policy was essential to prevent the Soviet Union from persuading people in Asia to embrace communism. But the United States already had made plain its intention to impose an American vision of social, economic, and political affairs on East Asia during the war at the Cairo Conference in 1943 and the Yalta Conference in 1945. The American quest to remake East Asia in its own image would become the unifying theme of postwar affairs across the Pacific, creating a predictable pattern of US frustration and failure. Historian Paul Schroeder (1958) has argued that China was at the heart of the Japanese–American dispute that led to war in 1941, and it was also at the center of US foreign policy calculations toward postwar Asia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had expected that ... log in or subscribe to read full text