Bibles and ginseng

It was “by more than Providence” that the United States, over the course of more than two centuries, became the pre-eminent power in Asia and the Pacific. Commerce, faith and notions of self-defence drove Americans westward, not only across a continent but also a wide expanse of ocean, says Michael J. Green, who served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council staff.

“Modern America’s pre-eminence in the Pacific was no accidental byproduct of victory in the Second World War, as many cursory histories suggest,” Green writes in By More Than Providence, his important and comprehensive study of America’s relations with the region. “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.”

As they moved across the Pacific, restless Americans took control of geographical specks like the Sandwich Islands — now called Hawaii — Samoa and Guam. The prize of the war with Spain at the end of the 19th century was the Philippines. In the process, Asia became America’s neighbour, as President Polk’s Treasury secretary, Robert Walker, declared.

Americans’ perceptions of their own interest in the region have guided them, despite occasional blundering and backtracking, to maintain generally consistent approaches and policies. As Green and others have noted, Washington became an offshore balancer, adopting the view that the United States had to prevent any one power from dominating the Asian landmass and its adjacent waters. The goal was for the Pacific to serve as “a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward,” Green writes, “and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.”

Protection of the Pacific, therefore, became a paramount concern. American presidents, diplomats, admirals and analysts may have disagreed on strategy, but the disagreements were mostly about how far forward to draw America’s defensive line. As Walter Lippmann noted, the United States was never isolationist in the Pacific.

The American effort over time is all the more remarkable because democracies are, by their nature, ill-suited to maintaining consistent foreign policies, something noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. As Green writes: “The founders created a system that was designed to prevent precisely the kind of centralisation of decision-making imagined by Thucydides, Clausewitz and other classical strategic thinkers.” Yet America has been able to maintain consistency because its policy, he perceptively notes, “always flowed organically from the Republic’s values and geographic circumstances.”

Those geographic circumstances — two oceans — did not insulate America. The United States fought two great wars in Europe in the last century, both to prevent one power, Germany, from seizing the continent. That same strategic imperative forced Washington to engage in two epic struggles in the Asia-Pacific, first a war with Japan and then a multi-decade effort to contain Soviet power.

Now, the United States finds itself involved in a third campaign to prevent a state from asserting hegemonic control in Asia. Green points out that Asia is defined in large part “by the waxing and waning of the Sinocentric order.” During the 19th and 20th centuries, Chinese weakness was the cause of instability as various powers rushed in to carve up the declining Qing dynasty and its war-torn successor, the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek. China today is no longer, as George Marshall put it, “a lamb before the shearers,” and it is Chinese assertion that is now roiling the region.

Yet just as the book reaches this period and becomes especially relevant to today’s challenges, it falters. To his credit, Green acknowledges how difficult it is for the “inside chronicler” to serve as historian, but his lack of objectivity affects the narrative and analysis in important ways.

For instance, Green glosses over the spy plane incident of April 2001, when a Chinese jet clipped the wing of a propeller-driven United States Navy EP-3 in international airspace over the contested South China Sea. Beijing detained the crew of 24 for 11 days, stripped the plane of its electronic gear and refused to let it fly out of China on its own power.

The response of the White House under the second Bush was troubling — issuing what the Chinese took to be an apology and offering a compensatory payment — and almost surely encouraging Beijing to believe it no longer had to respect norms of conduct in the global commons. In any event, the incident marked the beginning of a period of Chinese advances in the region, many of them at the expense of the United States. In the hopes of maintaining cooperative relations, the Bush administration unintentionally empowered the more belligerent elements inside China by showing that the United States had little will to oppose them. Green’s book breezes past the incident, ignoring the consequences of Bush’s inadequate response to his first crisis in the region.

Green says Bush remained involved in Asia and notes that he was the only president to attend all the summits of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He also took the lead, Green says, in initiating and completing free-trade agreements in the region. Many on the ground, however, felt that Washington was walking away from Asia, something not discussed by Green. So rich in detail and insight in the period up through the Clinton presidency, “By More Than Providence” goes flat in the Bush years.

Green returns to form when analysing the Obama administration. Obama was not, as many declared, the first “Pacific president” — Richard Nixon has a claim to that title — but he was “the first to declare Asia as the highest priority in US foreign policy.” In the initial years of his first term, that meant pursuing accommodating policies that were not ultimately reciprocated by Beijing.

Eventually, a frustrated White House adopted the “pivot” — later rebranded the “rebalance” — that “represented a return to balance-of-power diplomacy.” Green’s thoughtful analysis of Obama’s second-term approaches to China shows that the president, with his “Japan card” and “India card,” was engaging in traditional American statecraft.

That statecraft, however, was more than just a realpolitik power play. Washington’s policy has always included democracy promotion as a central element because cynical realism has been unsustainable in the American Republic. Green notes - perhaps correctly — that America will never win a raw-power contest with a cash-rich and conscience-free China, but the United States can prevail when it talks about democratic values. Those values, after all, are widely accepted in the region.

In a sense, values are part of the grand American strategy. Some have argued it is nonsense to speak in such terms — “there is no such thing as a grand strategy for Asia,” the diplomat Winston Lord once wrote — but America has in fact had such a strategy, and has been successful. “The majority of Asian states today enjoy democratic self-government,” Green writes, “which despite the enormous courage and vision demonstrated by the citizens of those nations would not have been possible without the long-term American commitment to supporting democratic norms in the region.” In short, Asia-Pacific states sharing American ideals reinforce American influence and security.

“Is the United States capable of grand strategy?” Green asks as he sums up the history he has covered. The answer is that American policy has, at least much of the time, been consistent, effective and beneficial in effect, from the moment Americans first looked across the Pacific. The general peace and prosperity of the region tell us the answer to Green’s question, fortunately, is yes.

–New York Times News Service

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China.