Strategic Providence and the American Journey in Asia

Abstract

Strategic Providence and the American Journey in Asia Kurt M. Campbell (bio) and Rush Doshi (bio) Michael Green's By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 is a magisterial work, well-argued and exhaustively researched, that provides an invaluable service for those who care about U.S. Asia policy. Indeed, no other book in nearly a century has sought to study so intently the broad sweep of U.S. grand strategy in Asia since the founding of the republic. As U.S. foreign policy experts currently grapple with the implications of a risen China and debate the way forward in Asia, Green's historical treatment generates unique and original insights rooted in the past but relevant for the present. His survey of the United States' Asia strategy in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries should form part of the foundation for considering Asia strategy in this century. In scope and ambition, By More Than Providence helps anyone seeking to understand how the United States has grappled with Asia from the revolutionary period through the Cold War and the war on terrorism. The book is divided into four parts, each covering the rise of a different power. The first part focuses on the rise of the United States and the second, third, and fourth on the rise of Japan, the Soviet Union, and China, respectively. The structure, which is both thematic and chronological, works well. Within each of these four parts, Green explores U.S. grand strategy, its adjustment to a shifting balance of power, and its ultimate effectiveness. Some of the book's most fascinating insights are in its history up through the end of the Cold War. For most states, and especially for democracies, grand strategy is a challenging endeavor. Green's central argument, however, is that despite occasional inconsistencies and inevitable missteps, the United States has over the last two centuries developed a "distinctive strategic approach" toward the Asia-Pacific. In his view, "the United States has emerged as the preeminent power in the Pacific not by providence alone but through the effective (if not always efficient) application of military, diplomatic, economic, and ideational tools of national power to the problems of Asia" (p. 4). [End Page 128] The book's chapters chronicle the ways that faith, commerce, geography, and self-defense have repeatedly drawn the United States toward involvement in Asian affairs, but Green sees national strategy as rooted in something even more fundamental. "If there is one central theme," he argues, it is U.S. opposition to any other power exercising "exclusive hegemonic control over Asia or the Pacific" (p. 5). Green argues that the success of these strategies was a product of "more than providence," though he would likely agree that providence too played a defining role. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which together insulate the United States from destructive great-power struggles abroad, constitute a "strategic providence" inherited by successive American generations. This geographic blessing provides Americans with the foundation for pursuing counter-hegemonic strategies in Asia and other regions. Some might quibble with whether the United States' Asia strategy has been as coherent up close as it appears from a distance, and whether the counter-hegemonic imperative was as evident to American Asia strategists and policymakers in the trenches at any given moment as it was to scholars decades or even a century later. Green's thorough research—nearly a quarter of the book's seven hundred pages are endnotes—effectively answers elements of this charge, demonstrating that many policymakers and presidents thought in these grand strategic terms, though some (like Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon) are said to have done better than others (like Calvin Coolidge and Jimmy Carter). Rather than weaken his argument, Green's honest acknowledgement that not all policymakers had a consistent or effective Asia strategy is precisely what generates many of the book's most illuminating and original insights. It allows Green to highlight the deep structural reasons that the United States sometimes vacillated in the pursuit of its interests in Asia and explain the variations in its strategic effectiveness. Green identifies five recurring historical tensions in U.S. grand...