ABSTRACT
Although much has been written about the United States’ role after World War II in the creation of regional security arrangements in Europe, it has often been assumed that such regional strategies were a nonissue with respect to Asia. Yet, while the final postwar security arrangements in Asia did indeed take a bilateral form, regional strategies were in fact considered at several points along the way. This chapter, using the framework developed in the previous chapter, examines the rise and fall of the initiative to create a Pacific Pact. It explains the shifts in policy preferences that led to the final choice of a bilateral strategy. More specifically, it shows how U.S. interest in a regional strategy only arose after being confronted with several conflicting policy goals. A regional alliance appeared able to accommodate at least some of these goals, mainly by serving both to balance against the Communist threat and to contain a possible resurgence of Japanese militarism. The chapter next considers how the extremely broad power disparities between the United States and its potential Pacific partners, as well as among the partners, discouraged a regional strategy. Finally, the chapter analyzes the central role that partners’ negative preferences played in shaping the final U.S. strategy choice. Because so little has been written directly about the Pacific Pact proposals, I begin with a brief historical overview of how this idea evolved.1
