casual dishonesty of an FDR. The president must appear to be not very bright yet be able to lie convincingly. The target of this charade will not be future allies but potential enemies. The United States needs to buy time.
The ideal American strategy will be to supply aid to support the development of indigenous military power that can deter attackers, or that can at least hold out long enough for help to arrive. U.S. aid can also create an environment of economic growth, both by building the economy and by providing access to American markets. During the Cold War, this is how the United States induced West Germany, Japan, and South Korea, among others, to take the risk of resisting the Communists.
Whatever argument the United States makes to Poland in the next few years, the Poles’ willingness and ability to serve American purposes will depend on three things. The first is U.S. economic and technical support to build a native Polish military force. The second is the transfer of military technology to build up domestic industry, both in support of national defense and for civilian use. The third is to supply sufficient American forces in Poland to convince the Poles that the American stake in their country is entirely credible.
This relationship must focus on Poland but be extended to the other Intermarium countries, particularly Hungary and Romania. Both of these are critical to holding the Carpathian line, and both can respond effectively to the kinds of incentives the United States is making available to them. The Baltics represent a separate case. They are indefensible, but if war can be avoided, the Baltics make an attractive bone to place in the Russians’ throat.
In all of this maneuvering, the point is first to avoid a war and second to limit a relationship between Russia and Germany that could, in succeeding decades, create a power that could challenge American hegemony. The present intentions of the Russians and Germans would be much more modest than that, but the American president must focus not on what others think now but what they will think later, when circumstances change.
Chapter 10
FACING THE WESTERN PACIFIC
The Western Pacific is a region that does not present an immediate crisis for the United States, but this happy state of affairs will not go on indefinitely. Asia was one of the key trouble spots in the world for a good part of the preceding century, and the relative tranquillity of the past thirty years has been the exception, not the rule. That is why the president’s task during the next decade will be to prepare carefully and at leisure for the inevitable crises that loom just over the horizon.
There is a great deal of concern about the Indo-Chinese balance of power, but India and China are divided by a wall—the Himalayas—that makes sustained conflict and high-volume overland trade virtually impossible. Their interaction is economic and by sea. The central and long-standing opposition in this region is actually that between China and Japan, the two nations locked in a tie for the world’s second largest economy. There is substantial economic competition. Economics affect a balance of power only when geography permits other kinds of competition. All other regional powers—including South Korea, a substantial economic force in its own right—exist within the framework of the China-Japan-U.S. balance. It is in terms of maintaining and manipulating that balance that the United States will define its policy during the next decade.
It is difficult to imagine two nations more different than China and Japan, and economic friction has made them hostile to each other since their first modern war, in 1895, when Japan defeated China’s navy. Japan is a maritime industrial power, utterly dependent on imports of raw materials for its survival. China, with its huge population and geography, is wedded to the land. From the moment Japan first began to industrialize, it has needed Chinese markets, raw material, and labor and has wanted these on the most favorable terms. The Chinese have needed foreign capital and expertise but have not wanted to fall under Japanese control. This wary interdependence of two economies led them into a brutal war in the 1930s and 1940s, during which Japan occupied a good deal of the Chinese mainland. The relationship between these two countries never fully recovered from that war, and hostility and distrust have been kept under control in part by the presence of the United States.
During the Cold War, the United States maintained complex relations with each country. It needed Japan’s industrial power to support the U.S. in the Korean War and beyond, as well as its geography to block the Soviet fleet from entering the Pacific. Japan willingly gave both. In return, the United States gave the Japanese access to American markets for its industrial products and did not require Japan to make a military commitment to American ventures around globe.
During the same era, the United States spent nearly thirty years in marked hostility to Communist China. Then, when it had dissipated its global power in Vietnam and needed a counterweight to the Soviets, it turned to China. China, afraid of the Soviet Union and seeing the United States as a guarantor of its own security, accepted the overture.
Neither China nor Japan was comfortable with the U.S relationship with the other, but the United States managed the triangulation without difficulty, because each country had more important issues to consider. China’s concerns were geopolitical: largely the fear of the Soviet Union. Japan’s were economic: its postwar economic boom. Each country needed the United States for its own reasons.
When the Cold War ended, the nature of the balance changed. Japan’s period of rapid growth stalled out as China, having adopted Japan’s focus on economics, was undergoing a prolonged boom. Japan remained the larger economy, but China became the most dynamic—a situation that the United States saw as quite satisfactory. Focused primarily on economic issues, the United States did not look at either country from a genuinely geopolitical point of view. In general, Asia was a matter for the Treasury Department and for managers of trade relations, not something of concern to the Department of Defense.
The stability of the western Pacific and southeast Asia since the 1980s is all the more notable when we consider that from Indochina to Indonesia, China, and elsewhere, Asia appeared to be one of the most unstable and unpromising regions in the world, a caldron of war, civil war, and general instability throughout the 1960s and ’70s.
The president must bear in mind that Asia is an extraordinarily changeable place, and in the next ten years we will undoubtedly see some things that are now regarded as immutable being utterly transformed. For example, the Chinese economy will face harsh tests while Japan begins recovering from its failures. The consensus in 1970 was that Asia was inherently violent and unstable; the consensus today is that it is peaceable and stable. These contradictory assessments suggest the challenges in determining what Asia will look like over the next decade, how the Sino-Japanese dynamic will play itself out, and what American policy should be toward the region.
CHINA, JAPAN, AND THE WESTERN PACIFIC
When we talk about east Asia, we are really talking about a string of islands stretching from the Kuriles to Indonesia, as well as their relations with one another and with the mainland. When we talk about the mainland, more than anything else we are talking about China.
China stretches twenty-five hundred miles inland and borders on fourteen countries. While China faces an ocean on only one side, it may be useful to think of it as a fairly narrow island clinging to the edge of the Pacific, isolated to the north, west, and south by virtually impenetrable barriers.
The image of an island holds up when we consider that the vast majority of China’s population lives in the eastern part of the country, within about four hundred miles of the coast. The reason for this concentration is the availability of water. The area between the line bisecting the map (facing page) and the coast marks the area in which more than fifteen inches of rain a year falls—the minimum needed to maintain large numbers of people. Since the western part of China is too arid to maintain a large population, more than a billion people are crammed into a region about the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, not including New England. This is Han China, the
