The United States and Asia: Future Prospects

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The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ushered in a new era of U.S. involvement in Asia. In the past lay hearty merchant-voyagers, missionaries and assorted diplomats. Only in the Philippines, however, had Americans become deeply involved in an Asian society, and even there colonial governance was in the hands of a relative few. For the average American, Asia signified exotica-a distant region wholly foreign and to many, slightly ominous.

In the years since 1941, however, massive American military involvement was to be followed by diverse efforts at political tutelage, extensive cultural exchange and a level of economic and financial intercourse that was eventually to make the Pacific-Asian region more critical to the American economy than Europe.

Millions of Americans acquired a personal knowledge of certain parts of Asia. In addition a growing Asian population in the United States has begun to influence American society in a variety of ways as the century draws to a close. Thus, just as victory in war extended the United States further into the Pacific, so that victory bound America to Asia in ways that could not possibly have been foreseen on that fateful day of December 7, 1941.

II

To understand where the United States stands today and what future prospects exist for U.S. relations with Asia, one must first comprehend the enormous changes that are taking place throughout this vast region.

First, note the geopolitical transformation. At the close of World War II the Eurasian heartland was strong, its peripheries weak. Although deeply wounded by that war, the Soviet Union had the strength and will to build a buffer-state system to the West and, in alliance with the newly victorious communists in China, to project communist power to the edges of the Asian mainland. Western Europe and the peripheral regions of Asia, including Japan, on the other hand, were weak, either crippled by the war or emerging from lengthy colonialism. Only substantial American military and economic assistance provided the key peripheral societies with an opportunity for renewal.