오래된 미래: 미중 냉전과 인도-태평양의 형성

Abstract

This article examines the long history of the Indo-Pacific, the imagined geographic entity proposed by the United States and its allies with intent to counter the expansion of China and its Belt and Road Initiative, in particular. While exploring the development of the U.S. policy toward a greater Asia, this article demonstrates that at the origins of the Indo-Pacific was the American grand strategy for containing People’s Republic of China. In the early twentieth century, strategists and geographers of the United States, Germany, and other places articulated the concept of Indo-Pacific as a key contested terrain in the geopolitical competition between the land powers and sea powers for global hegemony. During the early Cold War years, this abstract concept took a more concrete form in international relations. The U.S. Cold War strategy for Asia was to contain the expansion of China by encircling this communist land power with the various democratic sea powers across the Pacific and Indian oceans. According to this strategy, the United States sought to combine the countries stretching from Japan to India into what Dean Acheson termed the “Great Crescent.” One by one, the Indo-Pacific sea powers-that encompassed Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaya, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and India-aligned themselves with the United States and against China. This Great Crescent, after many twists and turns and long dormancy, has come to provide the United States and its allies with the historical archetype of the “free and open Indo-Pacific.”