Kuan-Jen Chen, <i>Charting America's Cold War Waters in East Asia: Sovereignty, Local Interests, and International Security</i>

Nearly every day, an article appears in a major U.S. news outlet about the challenges posed by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to U.S. policy in Asia. Often at the center of these news stories is the western Pacific. What is typically not discussed is how the U.S. government came to see maintaining a dominant position in the waters of the western Pacific as a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy and national security. If this topic is broached, usually all that is said is a phrase or two about U.S. preeminence in Asia since World War II. Nothing further is said about how U.S. elites built up the political, economic, and military structures that established the United States as the premier Pacific power in the immediate postwar years and sustained and normalized U.S. regional ascendancy throughout the Cold War and after. These structures are instead taken as a geopolitical given, not in need of further examination.Kuan-Jen Chen's Charting America's Cold War Waters takes a decidedly different approach to U.S. supremacy in Asia. In flowing, conceptually rich prose, Chen draws on a wealth of archival materials to explain how U.S. elites came to believe that upholding U.S. influence in the western Pacific was and still is a national security imperative. The historical process Chen presents is part of a broader shift in U.S. strategic thinking after World War II that induced denizens of the Beltway to conceive of not just the western Pacific but all the worlds’ oceans as U.S. lakes. The United States adopted this geostrategic outlook in the 1940s and 1950s when all great-power competitors, except for the Soviet Union, had been destroyed or severely enervated by World War II.Officials in Washington took advantage of this unique historical juncture and projected U.S. power worldwide by establishing a global network of military bases, most notably even on the territory of two former great-power competitors—Germany and Japan. The United States also arranged security treaties that integrated these top industrial states into a U.S.-led global security architecture and made them into semi-sovereign states dependent on U.S. military forces for their national defense. Chen capably shows in his book that in the western Pacific, and elsewhere in the world, a major driver behind the creation and maintenance of an U.S.-led world order from the 1940s to the 1970s was an abiding concern about Communist expansion and a commitment to hemming in the Soviet Union and the PRC.When historians recount the global rise of the United States after the Second World War, they typically focus their attention on events taking place on land and have territorial states at the center of their analysis. Or they concentrate on great-power struggles to attain air dominance. Often sidelined, and even forgotten, in these historical narratives is the formation of U.S. maritime primacy. And yet the U.S. Navy has since World War II played a pivotal role in patrolling the main veins of global trade—international sea lines of communication. As Chen illustrates, the U.S. government constructed a U.S.-led maritime order in Asia to prevent Moscow from impinging on U.S. naval power, to limit Soviet global power projection capabilities, and to keep the Soviet Navy focused on protecting the USSR's coastal regions.Chen highlights that the genesis of U.S. maritime preeminence in the western Pacific was not an entirely smooth process. The U.S. Air Force and Navy had different visions of how to manage the waters of the western Pacific, and they engaged in bureaucratic struggles to assert their diverging interests. Yet, amid interservice rivalries, a broad consensus took shape among U.S. leaders that for the United States to be secure, it could not focus on just one part of the world. It had to be a global power that took responsibility for safeguarding world trade networks that were crucial to U.S. prosperity. Chen shows that the U.S. Navy's monitoring of Pacific trade lines was an essential element of East Asia's developmental states, which all relied on overseas resources and markets.Another vital point Chen makes is that U.S. hegemony was not just a top-down affair, and that if it had been, it would probably have been less robust. Much scholarship on U.S. foreign policy in Asia overlooks this feature of U.S. power in the region, emphasizing instead the coercive nature of the U.S. presence, the wars the United States has fought in Asia, the imposition of U.S. norms, and the inequities that have accompanied U.S. regional influence. When discussing countries’ fishing rights and economic zones, Chen's book is a valuable reminder that U.S. flexibility was crucial in solidifying the norms and rules that came to be the sinews of the liberal international order.U.S. flexibility made room for the agency of small powers, providing space for regional allies and partners to assert their inserts and have a say in regional norm-making. The malleability of U.S. hegemony made the Pacific into not just a U.S. dominion but an Amer-Asian region, in which the United States adapted to partners’ interests. U.S. adjustments may not have gone as far as regional actors would have liked, but they occurred often enough to legitimize U.S. primacy. This geopolitical dynamic helps to explain the endurance of U.S. regional hegemony and is especially important to recall at a time when the PRC is aiming to displace the United States and create a China-led Asia.When Chinese propagandists seek to challenge U.S. global influence, they frequently do so by characterizing the United States as a self-centered empire that places its own interests above others. This line of critique has been around since the advent of U.S. hegemony in Asia in the 1940s. It is also widely evident in U.S. scholarship that scrutinizes the coercive side of U.S. influence in the world. Given this long-standing negative portrayal of U.S. geopolitical might, it would have been interesting for Chen to engage in a more sustained manner with the question of what kind of international order the United States built in the western Pacific during the Cold War.Was the United States an empire as the PRC has claimed? Or was it a new sort of international formation that consigned empire to history's dustbin? Or was the truth somewhere between these two extremes? Chen seems to view the postwar United States in Asia as an informal empire, but it would have helped if he had elaborated his thoughts on the matter at greater length. Nonetheless, Charting America's Cold War Waters is a marvelous book that will be invaluable for anyone seeking to comprehend how the United States came to perceive the western Pacific as the fulcrum of U.S. hegemony in Asia.