Soon after the American Revolution, certain of the founders began to
recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the
vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming
generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade
with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the
continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United
States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic
principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the
present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic
thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American
statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material
realities.
Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon
and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy
toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to
isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from
becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and
forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems
from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from
Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records
the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far
East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when
compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.
