Chalmers Johnson
Review Essay
Mar/Apr
2004
From Washington to Baghdad, the debate over American empire is back. Five new books weigh in, some celebrating the imperial project as the last best hope of humankind, others attacking it as cause for worry. What they all fail to understand is that U.S. power is neither as great as most claim nor as dangerous as others fear.
Essay
Jul/Aug
1995
The Defense Department's new report on East Asia reads as if the Cold War is ongoing. For Japan, the report signals U.S. acceptance of its ruinous trade deficits. For other Asian nations, it signals the hollowness of American superpower pretensions. The report masks the failure of the Clinton administration's trade policy. By insisting Japan remain a U.S. protectorate, Washington encourages Tokyo's reactionaries. The real threat to Asian security is not China but U.S. distrust of Japan as a true ally. Cold War military power is irrelevant to the economic challenges posed by East Asia's dynamism. Someone should tell the Pentagon.
Essay
Special
1983
The major events of 1983 in East Asian politics and economics can be looked at from three broad vantage points or planes of abstraction. At the most general level one sees, rather like the movements of tectonic plates on the earth's surface, a slight shift in the center of gravity of U.S. foreign policy from Europe toward Asia. In large part this shift is prompted by a growing realization among the leaders of the United States and Japan that their nations will, for the indefinite future, be paramount in the fundamental sciences and their practical offshoots in microelectronics, biotechnology, fine ceramics, and other new areas of technical development, and that Western Europe will trail in most of these fields and the Soviet Union simply be left behind. The fact that the American President met with the prime minister of Japan three times during 1983 underscores this trend, as did the President's statement in Tokyo in November that "No relationship between any two countries is more important to world peace and prosperity than the relationship between the United States and Japan."
Capsule Review
Summer
1982
Essay
Fall
1978
Since the death of Mao Tse-tung on September 9, 1976, two sets of influences have combined to produce significant movement in Chinese foreign policy. The first impetus to change, and certainly the most important, has been the domestic political requirements of the new leaders for legitimacy and stability. The second has been external developments to which the Chinese government has had to be responsive.
Essay
Jul
1972
Over the past century the politics of East Asia have been influenced more profoundly by the Sino-Japanese relationship than by any other single factor. Because both the two present-day societies have roots in classical Chinese civilization-only a "heritage" for each today-Chinese and Japanese politicians before World War II often argued that there was a special binding relationship between them. Japan's written language and much of its religious, artistic and moral civilization derive from Chinese culture, while Japan was the primary influence both positively and negatively on whole generations of Chinese revolutionaries, some of whom are still alive and active today. Perhaps because of this common heritage of civilization and mutual influence, the enormous misunderstandings, wars, threats and depredations that have characterized Sino-Japanese relations for a century have tended to take on the ferocity of a family or civil feud. Even though well-educated Chinese and Japanese can learn each other's language rather easily, it is doubtful whether any two peoples in the twentieth century have approached each other with more profoundly misleading stereotypes.
