ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century the Americans reached out into the Pacific. They bought Alaska from the Russians (1867), took the Philippines and Guam from Spain (1898), and annexed Hawaii, Midway, Wake and eastern Samoa. Between 1904 and 1914 they built the Panama Canal, giving ships a far shorter route between the Atlantic and the Pacific than the ones through the Magellan strait or round Cape Horn (5, 72). In Japan, whose rulers had long
forces’ advances in Indochina aroused fears about the new power of a China which then had Soviet backing. The Americans undertook to protect Taiwan against attack from the Chinese mainland, and South Korea against any renewed attack from the north; and they were gradually drawn into the conflict in Vietnam (56, 59-61).
