Introduction

Abstract

This chapter emphasizes that the precarity of Asian peace is a problem not only in its own right but for the United States as well. It argues that sustaining Asian peace requires not only acknowledging but also trying to improve the Pacific power paradox: the unvarnished reality that the United States has presented three different faces toward the Asian peace, sometimes simultaneously. The chapter first investigates how much has America really mattered, for good or ill. It aims to answer the following questions: What U.S. decisions and thought processes have gone into preserving regional stability? How, if at all, does U.S. officials' thinking about Asia over time differ from the way scholars have explained the absence of war in the region? To what extent has Washington been not just a source of, but also a threat to, regional security? More importantly, what might the United States do to shore up an Asian peace that is today under tremendous strain? To answer these questions, the chapter explains explain the Asian peace itself and America's role in it.