Though most often remembered as a catch phrase, “The American Century” stands as one of the purest distillations of that twentieth-century vision of the world transformed in the American image. The notion of an American Century articulated by Henry Robinson Luce in a February 1941 Life editorial offers an inviting point of departure to reflect on a turbulent century of U.S. engagement in East Asia and to sketch some of the defining features of U.S.-East Asian relations over the past century. This essay begins with a brief treatment of the ideological impulse that shaped Luce's – and arguably the dominant American – approach to the region. It continues by tracing the travails that his crusade encountered there and by identifying the main sources of those travails. It concludes by suggesting alternatives to Luce as the prophet of the American project in Asia.

The Luce vision

When Luce addressed his countrymen in 1941, he did so as a therapist disturbed by national malaise. He found them “unhappy,” “nervous,” “gloomy,” and “apathetic.” To calm their “foreboding” about the future, he prescribed emulation of the moral certitude and commitment displayed by the British. Their decision to stand up to Hitler, Luce announced, had banished national “nervousness” and even “all the neuroses of modern life.” Luce traced his own country's malaise back to the rejection of the internationalist path on which Woodrow Wilson had embarked in 1919.