ABSTRACT
The conduct of American foreign policy towards the Asia-Pacific since 1945 has been shaped by the complex interplay between global priorities and regional interests. As the world’s leading power in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States has tended to cast its policies in terms of global visions and strategies. The significance attached to East Asia should be considered not only in terms of the historical evolution of American relations with that part of the world, but also with reference to its place within the broader international context of America’s foreign relations. Relations with particular regions and countries may have their own distinctive features, but ultimately, the extent of American engagement has been determined by the place allotted to them within the larger scope of American priorities as a whole. American policies in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War were
shaped by the desire to build a better world, formed in part by the perceived lessons of that war and of what had led up to it. The war itself was seen as an integral whole. In the words of President F.D. Roosevelt, it was ‘a single world conflict that required a global strategy of self defence’.1 The war brought to the fore the tension in the balance of priorities to be attached to the Atlantic and Pacific dimensions of America’s geopolitical interests that has continued ever since. Even though the Atlanticists won the day then, and in the persons of Dean Acheson and George Kennan they continued to shape priorities after the war, the global significance of East Asia was not overlooked. To the surprise of Churchill, Roosevelt insisted in 1943 on China being elevated to one of the ‘Big Five’ in the future United Nations. After the war Japan figured prominently in the State Department’s thinking on global economic reconstruction and as one of the centres that the emerging policy of containment had to defend.2
