By More Than Providence

Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783

Michael Green

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542722
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diplomazia e trattati

Soon after the American Revolution,?certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities.

Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

PART ONE

THE RISE OF THE UNITED STATES

In January 1813, the thirty-two-gun frigate Essex under the command of Captain David Porter was cruising the South Atlantic in search of British merchant vessels to raid. The first year of America’s war with Britain—the “Second Revolution”—had been going badly on land, but the intrepid U.S. Navy had bested British frigates and schooners in single-ship combat across the Atlantic Ocean. The crew of the Essex was hungry for its share of glory. The problem for Captain Porter was that he had lost touch with the rest of the navy and could not get past the seventy-four-gun British men-of-war blockading the eastern seaboard to return home for orders. Trapped at sea, Porter called his officers together in the wardroom to inform them of his audacious decision. Instead of returning north to Boston, he would take the Essex around the Horn of South America and enter the Pacific Ocean, which was entirely under the control of Britain and lacking any friendly harbor or ally for the young United States. Porter told his officers that the Pacific was fat with British merchant ships and whalers, and the blow to British pocketbooks and prestige would be well worth the risk. The assembled lieutenants and midshipmen, including thirteen-year-old David Glasgow Farragut—later famous for proclaiming “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” while in command during the Battle of Mobile Bay in the American Civil War—enthusiastically assented.

The Essex would be the first American warship in history to enter the Pacific Ocean, signaling to the world that the young republic would not be intimidated, even by the greatest power at sea, and that, under threat, America would expand rather than retreat.

Writing about Porter’s exploits in his history of the U.S. Navy in the War of 1812 a half century later, Harvard senior Theodore Roosevelt noted that until the Essex entered the Pacific, American merchant ships and whalers had been forced to keep themselves well armed to beat off British raiders, “Malay proas,” and “Chinese junks.” But for a moment in 1813, the Americans plied the waters of the Pacific with confidence and pride: “Captain Porter had saved all our ships in those waters, had not cost the government a dollar, living purely on the enemy, and had taken from him nearly 4,000 tons of shipping and 400 men, completely breaking up his whaling trade in the South Pacific.”1

By the end of the century, President Theodore Roosevelt would ensure that no ancient civilization or modern empire could ignore American power or prestige in the Pacific. The United States would rise to command the West Coast, Alaska, Hawaii, and island outposts offshore from China.

But the arrival of an American empire of commerce and liberty in the Pacific was envisioned long before Roosevelt’s own rise to power—or even before Porter and the Essex rounded the Horn.

1. "A THEATRE FOR THE EXERCISE OF THE MOST AMBITIOUS INTELLECT"

SEEDS OF STRATEGY, 1784–1860

The next three chapters trace the evolution of American statecraft in Asia from the first encounters with China in the 1780s to the emergence of the United States as a major Pacific power a little over a century later. At the turn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt and his expansionist allies developed a thoroughly American grand strategy toward the Pacific that combined robust trade, a powerful navy, and pursuit of a maritime balance of power designed to keep the Pacific secure. Most historians begin the story of American statecraft in Asia and the Pacific from this point, but, in reality, the seeds of strategic thinking harvested by men such as Roosevelt, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and John Hay had been planted much earlier.

Even when the new American nation comprised only thirteen states nestled along the eastern seaboard and only a handful of its citizens had ever traveled west of the Missouri River—let alone to the Far East—prominent statesmen and merchants were thinking about how to lay the foundations for what the Founding Fathers foresaw as an “empire of liberty” stretching across the American continent, with influence beyond.1 These men knew of the potential for profitable trade with China, of the sea otter pelts that could be harvested along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, and of the Chinese Hong merchants’ passion for sandalwood from the Sandwich Islands. Barred by the British from trade with the West Indies and much of Europe, Yankee merchants and whalers soon began to rival the British commercial presence across the Pacific Rim. At the same time, the national government stood toe-to-toe with the British and Russians, asserting the United States’ right to the Pacific Northwest—hundreds of miles beyond where any but the hardiest Americans had yet settled. By the 1820s, American missionaries and regular U.S. Navy schooners were following the merchants into the Pacific. When pirates in Southeast Asia threatened American property in the 1830s, the navy launched punitive expeditions. When European powers encroached on American interests and missionary activities closer to home in Hawaii, the national government extended the Monroe Doctrine to the center of the Pacific.

Initially, Americans were concerned only with expanding trade and protecting their fellow citizens, but when the Qing Empire was dealt a devastating blow in the Opium Wars (1839–1842) and Asian regional order began to collapse from within, Americans were forced to consider their republic’s role in the larger transformation beginning in the Far East. Did the United States stand for anti-imperialism and self-determination for China or for the forceful opening of China to international trade by the British? As Russia, Britain, and France began to seize territory from the wounded Qing at midcentury, U.S. naval officers and diplomats began to call for their own forward outposts in the Western Pacific and debated whether the republic’s core interests lay in preserving China’s integrity against the other imperial powers or securing America’s maritime position around Japan and the offshore island chain. The elements of an early American grand strategy for the Pacific were coming into place, while its proponents were discovering the trade-offs and tensions inherent in great-power politics across a vast ocean. In Washington, however, few members of Congress or the administration were listening anymore. The republic was heading toward civil war, and the ambitions of a few Yankee merchant houses, naval officers, and diplomats in the Far East were of little consequence for a nation on the verge of self-immolation.

Chapter 1 concludes at this high-water mark of American ambition in the Pacific. Chapter 2 then traces the continued expansion of America’s presence and interests in Asia in the more restrained postbellum years of the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, chapter 3 brings us back to Roosevelt and the architects of America’s Pacific empire at century’s end—bold expansionists who turned instinctively to the definitions of national interest and the instruments of power proposed a half century earlier. And so—whether they have realized it or not—have most of those responsible for America’s Asia policy since.

“The Adventurous Pursuits of Commerce”: Early Canton Trade and the Imaginings of Power and Profit in the East Indies

When America secured its independence from Britain with the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, the new nation consisted of only four million souls, heavily concentrated along the eastern seaboard. The British still held a string of forts running from the St. Lawrence River across the Great Lakes; American merchants had lost the protection of the Royal Navy and were unable to trade in the British imperial system; the nation was saddled with debt; and the Articles of Confederation provided only the weakest framework for national policy-making. European powers, even the colonists’ erstwhile ally France, were not eager to see the new nation expand in North America or transplant its revolutionary ideology in the Old Country. The geography, values, and commerce for which the revolution had been fought were all in jeopardy.2

Yet, despite these uncertainties, there was also a profound conviction among the Founding Fathers that the new republic would have a major impact on the international system. The Pacific became an important if distant part of that vision. Before the revolution, Americans had called Asia the “East Indies” and knew the region only as a source of tea and fine porcelain for the best homes of New York, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. George Washington himself thought that China was populated by white people until he was informed otherwise after becoming president.3 Some colonists had crewed with British ships, including John Ledyard of Connecticut and John Gore of Virginia, who had sailed as Royal Marines with Captain Cook’s expedition to the Pacific and brought back tales of fur skins purchased in the Pacific Northwest for sixpence and sold in Canton for $100.4 The colonists had fought the revolution in large part in order to break free of the shackles of Britain’s mercantilist Navigation Acts, but after independence, Congress was unable to settle on terms for tariffs, and British merchants flooded the former colonies with cheap goods, causing an economic depression worsened by the massive debt accumulated during the war. Breaking into the East India trade would demonstrate America’s new commercial independence to the world and help to restore economic prosperity at home. To the young republic, the Pacific represented an opportunity to trade, and trade would henceforth define the American approach to Asia.

As the War of Independence drew to a close, Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris began to search for markets that would allow him to recover the enormous losses he had incurred as the lead banker for George Washington’s Continental army. On November 27, 1783, he wrote to Secretary of State John Jay to apprise him of his plans to initiate a new trading relationship with China: “We are dismissing the remains of our army and getting rid of expense, so that I may hope to see the end of my engagements before next May.… I am sending some ships to China, in order to encourage others in the adventurous pursuits of commerce, and I wish to see a foundation laid for an American navy.”5

Morris’s ship, the Empress of China, set sail from New York for Canton on February 22, 1784, carrying a cargo of forty tons of ginseng found in the Appalachian Mountains and one Major Samuel Shaw of Boston as supercargo. The expedition was an enormous success, turning a 400 percent profit. When the ship returned to New York the following May, there was a great sensation.6 Morris reported to Jay: “Our ship from China does tolerably well for the concerned; she has opened new objects to all America. A mandarin signs a passport for all European ships, directed to the commanders of two of the emperor’s forts on the river of Canton, nearly in the following words: ‘Permit this barbarian boat to pass; she has guns and men, consequently can do the emperor no harm.’ ”7

Undeterred by the Chinese refusal to grant him consular status, Major Shaw reported himself “peculiarly honoured” to represent American friendship to the Chinese and predicted that within a few years Americans would be “engaging in commerce with the subjects of that empire under advantages equal, if not superior, to those enjoyed by any other nation whatever.8 There was suddenly “everywhere a Rage for East India Voyages,” wrote Senator Henry Lee of Virginia to his friend James Madison, adding, “I fear our countrymen will overdo this.”9 Nine voyages were made to the Far East from New York alone before the end of 1787, and by 1790 Americans had sent twenty-eight ships to Canton.10 The China traders lobbied for and received protective duties from Pennsylvania and New York in 1791 and also enjoyed a two-year delay in the payment of tea duties.11 They also found liberal credits for trade, and profitable markets in continental Europe for reexport of tea from the United States. By the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, American vessels were second only to Britain’s in the tea trade with China.

Merchants and whalers fanned out across the rest of the Pacific Rim as well. In 1787, the Columbia and the Lady Washington out of Boston were the first American ships to sail directly to the North Pacific around Cape Horn on their way to China, picking up sea otter pelts to be sold in Canton. In 1790, American merchant ships began stopping to procure sandalwood in the Sandwich Islands (modern Hawaii), which proved a popular item for Canton’s Hong merchants, who burned it as incense and used it for scented fans.12 By 1800, American whalers were also stopping in New South Wales and New Zealand, and a few years later, American merchants were trading with the Japanese under the Dutch flag in the only open Japanese port, at Dejima, near Nagasaki (as proxies for the Dutch while Napoleon occupied the Low Countries in Europe).13 Salem merchants also began to import pepper from the northwest coast of Sumatra (the “Pepper Coast”), which they sold for enormous profits to the housewives of New England. Trade extended to the Indian Ocean as well. Under the 1794 Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Great Britain (the “Jay Treaty”), American merchants retained rights of trade to and from India—important for tea trade—though not with any other British colony. Ironically, this exception was granted by Governor General Lord Cornwallis, the British officer who had surrendered to the colonists at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781.

Ultimately, however, American merchants found themselves seeking commercial advantage in a world that was still dominated by European powers.14 En route from Boston or Baltimore to Canton, there was not a single seaport beyond Charleston where American ships could lay anchor without the permission of a European power. Usually, that power was Britain. Once in China, the Americans found the port at Canton dominated by the British East India Company. Backed by the guns of the Royal ...