Understanding America’s Many Wars
By Murray Polner
April 09, 2015 "ICH"
- "CJ"
- In
James Bradley’s new book “The
China Mirage” he asks why his father found himself fighting the Japanese on
Iwo Jima. He then traces the roots of that war to ill-advised U.S. policies, its
economic and paternalistic interest in China and its fear that Japan also had a
serious and competing interest in China and East Asia. He ends up concluding
that his father wound up on that godforsaken island so China could be freed from
Japanese control and exploitation, thus allowing the U.S. and its British, Dutch
and French imperial friends free access to its markets, resources and
geographical position.I recently watched “Sand
Pebbles,” a mesmerizing 1966 film about an American gunboat navigating the
Yangtze River deep into the Chinese interior during the
Nationalist-warlord-Communist civil wars of the mid-1920s. What the film never
explains, however, is that the ship was there to protect commercial rights and
extraterritorial privileges that European and American imperialists had seized
over many decades of one-sided accords.
In 1784 the “Empress of China,” an American ship funded in
part by businessmen eager to profit from the China trade, arrived in Canton. And
well into the 19th Century a few more Americans, one of whom was
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather, made their fortunes from the opium
trade. Long before the U.S. became a debtor nation to China many American
businessmen dreamed about vast treasures to be made in the lucrative China
trade. “Imagine,” I once heard my CCNY political science professor ask
in class, “if every Chinese man and woman wore a white shirt every day what
would it mean to American manufacturers of white shirts?”
It is Bradley’s contention that Americans have misunderstood
and misjudged China, wedded as they were to the fantasy that China was yearning
to be Christianized, Westernized and Americanized while ignoring that it had and
has its own national interests. This was never more obvious than after 1931,
when the Japanese –eager to control China as part of its sphere of interest–
invaded Manchuria, which the U.S. promptly denounced as an act of aggression.
For both nations the great prize was China.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor virtually every
American believed, then and now, that it was a sneak, unwarranted attack on an
innocent America. Far less concerned about Nazi conquests in Europe, most
Americans were furious at what the “Japs” did on December 7th, FDR’s
“Day of Infamy.” It then became morally and legally justifiable to incarcerate
America’s Nisei and Issei in western desert camps (for different reasons, Norman
Thomas, Robert Taft and J. Edgar Hoover were among the few public figures to
object) and fight a savage Pacific war, ending with nuclear bombs aimed at
Japanese civilians.
Over the years writers like Bradley have challenged the
dominant consensus that Japan, not the U.S., had alone provoked the war and was
an expansionist, militarist state, unwilling to compromise—that is, accept
American demands that it surrender its leading role in China. Bruce M. Russett’s
largely forgotten 1971 book, “No
Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into WWII”
argued, instead, that the U.S. contributed mightily to the coming of war by its
embargos (in concert with Britain and the Dutch) of oil and raw materials on a
Japan which had none of these vital resources. While “the threat to Japan of
a raw material scarcity was obvious,” the policy of “gradually tightening
economic measures,” Russett concluded, “was an escalation that was to drive
Japan not to capitulation, as it was intended to do, but to war with the United
States.”
Bradley’s view is that if the Japanese had submitted to U.S.
demands it would have meant abandoning China in favor of an updated imperial and
pro-western Open Door Policy. But Japan saw U.S. intervention in China as no
different from the Monroe Doctrine, which demanded absolute American control of
the Western Hemisphere. Once its oil pipeline was shut down Japan, writes
Bradley, was stranded like “an industrialized beached whale.” Neither
Tokyo nor Washington would budge, leading Dean Acheson, Henry Stimson and Henry
Morgenthau, among other White House hawks, to “set the war clock ticking in
Tokyo.” Surprisingly, Bradley reveals that neither FDR nor Cordell Hull,
his Secretary of State, knew that Acheson & Company had unilaterally cut off oil
shipments which, the Japanese historian Akira Iriye concluded in 1981, “had
a tremendous psychological impact upon the Japanese” and led directly to
Tokyo’s suicidal decision to go to war.
The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in
Asia,” is a vivid, bracing and careful study, sure to be dismissed by some as
revisionist history. Echoing Russett’s argument about the embargos and sanctions
against Japan, but going far beyond it, Bradley charges that long before Pearl
Harbor, U.S. policymakers were willing to go to war if Japan ever conquered
British and French Southeast Asia and Dutch Indonesia since that would mean the
loss of rubber, tin and tungsten that helped fuel American industry. Some of
Bradley’s arguments were already accepted in part by George Herring (“From
Colony to Superpower”): “[we] backed a proud nation into a position
where its only choices were war or surrender. John Toland’s verdict was that “a
grave diplomatic blunder” [was enabled] “by allowing an issue not vital to basic
American national interests—the welfare of China— to become, at the last moment,
the keystone of her foreign policy.” (Think of the U.S’s deepening involvement
with Ukraine today). Indeed, Jonathan Marshall’s “To Have and Have Not” wrote
that FDR – who inherited his grandfather’s passion for China — and his
pro-Chiang Kai-shek, anti- Communist aides — agreed with the “fundamental
proposition that the U.S. could not afford to lose the raw materials and sea
lanes of Southeast Asia,” never saying out loud that such a policy might
lead to war — a warning for Americans today that should China ever move on those
disputed rocky, uninhabited islets in the South China Sea claimed by Japan, the
Philippines and China, our mutual defense treaties would oblige us to go to war.
The U.S. managed to avoid a shooting war during the Chinese
civil wars but from late 1927 on placed its bet on Chiang. As WWII drew to a
close and the UN was being established FDR insisted that Chiang’s China be made
a member of the UN’s Big Four, which the ever quotable and opinionated Churchill
mocked. “In Washington,” he wrote in the fourth volume of his wartime
memoirs, “I had found the extraordinary significance of China in American
minds, even at the top, strangely out of proportion.” But FDR and his staff
intimates could not be persuaded.
For years, Washington’s foreign policy elite and compliant
mass media helped shaped popular support for Chiang and his glamorous
Americanized wife, whom Henry Luce, the son of missionaries, repeatedly praised
in his influential “Time.” Meanwhile, millions of American dollars were lavished
on Chiang and his wife’s powerful Soong family, fostering the illusion that the
Kuomintang was actually fighting the Japanese. The money often disappeared
(think, too, of all those unaccountable billions sent to our Iraqi and Afghan
war “allies”). As Bradley puts it, “Chiang handled the foreign loot,” a
sentiment with which Truman later agreed when he called Chiang and his pals
thieves. Finally, in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, America’s
favorites, were defeated by Mao’s communists and the U.S. refuse to recognize
the change until Nixon and Kissinger took their secret trip to Beijing.
The truth is that there never would have been a Korean War (or
a Vietnam War) had there not been a Cold War between Moscow and Washington. So
in June 1950 it was easy for American policymakers to misread an “an
incident in a small Asian civil war as a challenge to their global containment
policy, incorrectly concluding that Moscow—working through Beijing and
Pyongyang—had ordered the crossing [of the 38th Parallel] when it was
only a North Korean action.” To call off the dogs, Acheson recommended
Truman send in the military without a congressional authorization. Once the
shooting began and after Chinese “volunteers” entered the war, the China Lobby
and its allies in in Congress began denouncing Truman as an appeaser for losing
China. General MacArthur and the China Lobby repeatedly urged Truman to
“unleash” Chiang’s exiled and defeated army against the Chinese and North Korean
forces. After Truman fired MacArthur for insubordination, the China Lobby went
berserk.
“The son of a bitch [Truman] should be impeached,” growled
Joe McCarthy. If that weren’t enough, Bradley writes that Acheson,
incredibly, advised Truman “to send covert military aid to the French in
Indochina for their war against Ho Chi Minh. With no debate– and none was
sought—a Wise Man [Acheson], rattled by events in Asia he little understood,
committed the U.S. to current and future wars.” As David Halberstam’s “The
Coldest Winter,” his revealing book about the Korean War, commented,
correctly, “The issue of China itself hovered over every decision.”
“Who Lost China” became the deceitful and inflammatory slogan
of demagogic politicians, private and religious interests, wealthy businessmen
and Joe McCarthy and his minions. They pounced on an intimidated and frightened
State Department and White House. Veteran China specialists were fired,
persecuted and prosecuted for reporting that Mao was not Stalin’s stooge and
Chiang and his cohorts were corrupt and ineffective. (See, for example, John
Paton Davies, Jr.’s “China
Hand: An Autobiography”).
In retrospect, a fearful and angry nation had gone mad.
Blacklists, jail terms, a few, but very few, Soviet spies (we had our spies too
in Russia), and a shamefully conformist mass media helped scare and silence
potential critics. Bradley mentions that Acheson’s infamous and secret NCS-68
policy was adopted in April 1950 and transformed the nation into the militarized
global avenger of “evil” nations and also into an enduring national security
state, which Dwight Eisenhower later but unsuccessfully, warned us against.
Bradley makes it easier to understand LBJ’s plunge into Vietnam, George Bush’s
ill-fated invasion of Iraq and Obama’s immersion into the Middle East’s tangle
of complex religious and political rivalries.
Now, as if in a repeat of past history, Obama’s baffling,
unexplained “pivot to Asia” is clearly aimed at a powerful China, no longer an
American or Japanese supplicant. There are lessons to be learned about war and
peace and Bradley’s valuable book offers a warning about past and future
unnecessary entanglements.
Murray Polner
wrote “No
Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran“; “When
Can I Come Home,” about draft evaders during the Vietnam era; co-authored
with Jim O’Grady, “Disarmed
and Dangerous,” a dual biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan; and most
recently, with Thomas Woods,Jr., ”
We Who Dared to Say No to War.” He is the senior book review editor for the
History
News Network.