America's Pacific power in a global age

Summary

ABSTRACT.The U.S.A. had long believed that China was the key to the markets of the world. Defeat of Japan in the Second World War made the U.S. the dominant power in the Pacific, but not China as it expected. Instead the U.S. found itself confronting Chinese communism, and trading around the Pacific with coastal states outside communist control. Confrontation was only a limited success, but trade overcame communism and opened the door to China at last.

RÉSUMÉ.Les États-Unis considéraient depuis longtemps la Chine comme la clé d'accès aux marchés mondiaux. La défaite du Japon pendant la seconde guerre mondiale fit des État-Unis la puissance dominante sur le Pacifique, mais non sur la Chine comme ils l'espéraient. Ils se retrouvèrent au contraire à faire face au communisme chinois et ne purent établir d'échanges commerciaux qu'avec les États côtiers du Pacifique non contrôlés par le communisme. La confrontation n'eut qu'un succès limité mais le commerce finit par dominer le communisme et ouvrit enfin les portes de la Chine.

The country now known and constituted as the United States began life as a series of transplanted colonies of Europeans. They forged new societies along the Atlantic coastline of North America, and they maintained constant contact with their home countries across the ocean. Thus it is little surprise that, for several centuries, the American worldview held Europe as its main ideological and cultural reference point. This Eurocentric perspective has been reflected in the historiography, most recently in the influential Atlantic World school of early modern history which sees the Atlantic coastlands of the Americas, Europe and Africa as an integrated, systemic whole.

Yet the continental United States borders another ocean, the Pacific, that has played an equally important role in the nation's political and economic development. The Atlantic World may have been important, but so too were what Matt K. Matsuda has called the “Pacific worlds”. From the earliest days of the republic, statesmen like John Quincy Adams believed that the United States must expand westward or perish. If the Atlantic marked the natural beginnings of the nation, the Pacific coast was its logical, indeed necessary, conclusion. So important was the Pacific terminus that Adams pursued westward expansion even though it exacerbated sectional tensions over slavery between the North and the South.