The western Pacific has had its share of the international spotlight. In August 2022, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. China launched the military exercises around Taiwan to express its dissatisfaction. A war across the Taiwan Strait was on the verge. To ease the tension, President Joe Biden had a meeting with Xi Jinping during the G20 Bali Summit in November. While both sides reached nothing, the United States took advantage of this occasion to demonstrate its determination of maintaining the status quo in the Taiwan Strait again. It is because, in addition to chip production and democratic values, Taiwan occupies the position of geostrategic value. This small island in the western Pacific rim is the gateway to the central Pacific and the South China Sea, which are closely linked with America’s national security.

America’s attention to the tie between the Pacific and national interests was unequivocally shown up in Vice Presidents’ commencement addresses at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. On 22 May 2015, the then Vice President Joe Biden said: ‘President Xi of China, when I was meeting with him, asked me why do I continue to say America is a Pacific power? And I said because we are’.Footnote ² His exchange with Xi Jinping filled the hall with laughter. However, his words were not just a demonstration of his sense of humour; they reflected the increasingly severe tensions with China in the western Pacific rim. In the years leading up to Biden’s address, maritime East Asia had become a site of rivalry between great powers and sometimes of conflict. In 2009, US naval forces (including the USNS Impeccable) got into a scrape with five Chinese vessels in the South China Sea.Footnote ³ This incident was not unusual. In 2013, the guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens almost collided with a Chinese warship in the same area.Footnote ⁴ The maritime space in the western Pacific rim has had the potential to trigger a conflict between the United States and China. For this reason, after joking light-heartedly with the midshipmen, Biden’s tone grew more serious. ‘But we do – unapologetically – stand up for the equitable and peaceful resolution of disputes and for the freedom of navigation’.Footnote ⁵ He told the young naval officers that Americans ‘are going to look to you to uphold these principles wherever they are challenged, to strengthen our growing security partnerships, and to make good on our unshakable commitment to the mutual defense of our allies’.Footnote ⁶ This includes securing America’s interests in maritime East Asia. In Vice President Mike Pence’s commencement address at the Naval Academy in 2017, he said something similar: the United States must remind ‘the world what American leadership looks like. That’s also what the Navy does’.Footnote ⁷ The two men may have different party affiliations, but they voiced a unified perspective: that for the United States, not only does the oceanic space serve as a geographical space in which it can project its military power, it also links up its allies and thus allows the United States to maintain its dominance in East Asia. Both aspects of this perspective suggest that the United States should stand up for the freedom of navigation and commit itself to the mutual defence of its allies.

The strife between the United States and China in the western Pacific has a long history, but the chaotic year of 2019 culminated in a showdown between Washington and Beijing. The deterioration of the US–China relationship as the result of a trade war, the Hong Kong crisis, and COVID-19 are currently exacerbating regional security issues in the western Pacific. In April 2020, Beijing dispatched its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, to patrol between Taiwan and the Philippines in the South China Sea. The United States bolstered its naval forces in response. The maritime space serves as a barometer allowing one to gauge the twists and turns of international politics, US foreign policy, and intra-East Asian relationships. Decision-makers in contemporary Washington DC view the ocean as an essential element of international security. Nevertheless, the connection between the seas and international security has not always been well understood. Seventy years ago, the Truman administration not only reduced the strength of the US Navy but also halted plans for the construction of a supercarrier, the 65,000-tonne USS United States. Naval leaders publicly balked at Truman’s policies in what became known as the revolt of the admirals. The contrasting appreciation of the maritime space then and now compels us to explore the historical evolution of US foreign policy and the concept of international waters.

The scholarship on the US Navy and the US–Atlantic Europe relationship is extensive, but we have yet to adequately understand the entanglements between the United States and maritime East Asia during the Cold War. Drawing on archives in Chinese, English, and Japanese, this book seeks to provide a clear and reasoned description and an in-depth analysis of the links between America’s East Asian policy and the ocean following the dissolution of the Japanese Empire in August 1945, a turning point in world history that Ian Buruma refers to as Year Zero.Footnote ⁸ In maritime East Asia – a geographical space consisting of countries on the East Asian landmass and offshore islands in the western Pacific rim embracing the maritime space of the Yellow and East China Seas – regional politics were being rapidly restructured. Imperial Japan’s Gunkan kōshinkyoku (Fleet March) was no longer being chanted and the British Royal Navy’s glory days had faded away, a juncture which the United States exploited to assume dominion over maritime East Asia on the strength of its mighty naval forces. Might we hence conclude on the basis of America’s robust military strength that, in the context of the Cold War standoff, the shaping of the maritime space’s new political contours was a black-and-white story? I argue that it is not. In support of my argument, this book centres on two inter-related aspects of this story: how the seas changed along with the shifting political and military contours of East Asia, and the roles played by local sovereignty and local interests in East Asia in the shaping of America’s post-war maritime policy and international security concerns. The legacy of America’s role in post-war maritime East Asia and the international political order in the Asia–Pacific area during the Cold War still weighs heavily even now. The questions of how the United States managed this hub-and-spokes alliance in East Asia via the maritime space and how, why, and when the United States changed its perception of the sea prior to the US–China rapprochement have so far eluded historical enquiry.Footnote ⁹ In this book, maritime East Asia is looked at from a geographical perspective as an integral international community whose vibrant stories tell of the sovereignty, local interests, and American national and international security concerns that shaped the dynamics of Cold War East Asia.

The Emergence of the Pacific in American History

When analysing history, the sea must not be overlooked.Footnote ¹⁰ American history is no exception. The maritime lanes governed by the European colonial powers of Britain, France, and Spain prepared the waters for them to sail across the Atlantic and establish settlements in the New World in the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹¹ The Atlantic played an extremely important role in linking the European powers and their colonies. In 1783, following the American War of Independence, Great Britain recognised the United States. The geographical features of the North American continent allowed this budding country to develop into both a continental and a maritime country. However, it did not become a maritime power immediately. America’s founders viewed the Atlantic merely as a belt facilitating American relations with Europe or as a natural barrier against the menace from Europe. At this point, it is necessary to define the difference between a maritime state and a maritime power. A maritime state can be broadly defined as a country that has a coastline or access to the ocean for fishing, smuggling, and trade purposes; this cannot be equated with a maritime power. Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union, gave a distinctive definition of the nature of sea power. According to Gorshkov, a powerful navy was a prerequisite to a maritime authority being able to back the ‘possibilities for the state to study (explore) the ocean and harness its wealth [and] the status of the merchant and fishing fleets and their ability to meet the needs of the state’.Footnote ¹² A sea power’s navy was not limited to the function of protecting its civilians by showing its flag, but such a power could, as Gorshkov further pointed out, exert its military and political influence in support of its foreign policy.Footnote ¹³ Early America’s limited maritime activities justify classifying it as a maritime state rather than a maritime power.

As America’s territory gradually extended to the west coast, the Pacific Basin entered American history, and the ocean to the west allowed the American pioneers to explore yet another unknown world.Footnote ¹⁴ The official presence of the United States in maritime East Asia dates to the nineteenth century, after British gunboats blasted open the heavy, but not stout, gates of Imperial China between 1840 and 1842 during the First Opium War. As a Pacific state, America did not lag far behind its British friend in expanding into maritime East Asia. In 1844, American diplomat Caleb Cushing signed the Treaty of Wanghia with Keying, Viceroy of Liangguang. According to this treaty, the Americans were entitled to acquire property at the ports of Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai and to extraterritoriality in China; American missionaries were permitted to preach to the Chinese people without any restriction; and the US Navy was allowed to operate near treaty ports for commercial inspection. However, these privileges did not satisfy America’s ambition to extend its influence over the western Pacific. It required a supply point for its commercial links with China. The next such supply point ended up being Tokugawa, Japan. As a consequence of the world-renowned Perry Expedition, Japan was forced to sign the Kanagawa Treaty, which opened up the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to commercial activities with the United States. Matthew C. Perry’s Kurofune (black ship) brought to an end of Tokugawa’s policy of isolation and integrated Japan into the United States’ trading network in maritime East Asia. In order to protect its East Asian business interests, the United States established a standing naval force there in 1868 – the Asiatic Squadron – which eventually developed into the Asiatic Fleet in 1910.Footnote ¹⁵ The United States was gradually on the way from a maritime state to a sea power. Norman Friedman’s research unveils this transformation in the context of evolution of national/naval strategy. Before 1880 America’s naval strategy was ‘designed to deter Britain through the threat of trade warfare’. Along with the advance of science and technology, the United States perceived that individual European countries could also pose a threat to US territory. From 1889 onwards, by building an offensive fleet which could attack on adversaries, the United States attempted to deter any European careerists from ‘operating in the New World’.Footnote ¹⁶ America’s naval development was thereafter in line with this national strategy.Footnote ¹⁷ Given America’s involvement in the 1898 Spanish–American War, the 1899 Philippine–American War, and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in Qing China, one could argue that, prior to the twentieth century, it viewed the maritime space as a blue highway to cultural interaction, immigration, trade, and war. Gradually, however, American history was interwoven with the historical evolution of the western Pacific.

Why Does Maritime East Asia Matter?

The maritime space is depicted through regional developments in which the language used by different individuals in different contexts has different meanings. A growing number of historians are beginning to connect maritime issues with other disciplines and are taking a transnational approach to depicting maritime history and observing interaction between empires and locals on a global scale, which allows for an understanding of the dynamics between oceans and continents.Footnote ¹⁸ However, as Amélia Polónia reminds us, maritime history can be categorised as transnational or global history but not always, because local and national biases still have influence on analytical framework.Footnote ¹⁹ For Europe, including Scandinavia and the areas along the Mediterranean Sea, the sea has served as a stage on which the powers have competed over politics, business, and culture, which has led to the historical emergence of sea power states in these areas. East Asia, however, has had a different experience. Unlike other seas, including the Central Pacific, the western Pacific rim has not received the scholarly attention it is due. Historian Barak Kushner draws on Tony Judt’s concept of edges of empire to make us rethink the intricate fallout of the dissolution of Imperial Japan.Footnote ²⁰ This approach may also enrich our understanding of the historical evolution of maritime East Asia. Maritime East Asia, which underwent profound changes in leadership as hegemony passed from China to Japan and then to a US-backed alliance system, was a space shaped both wittingly and unwittingly on the periphery of successive empires and by successive rulers.

Prior to the intrusion of the Western powers with their brand of gunboat diplomacy in the middle of the nineteenth century, the region’s international order was based on the imperial Chinese tributary system. Whichever the dynasty, the Chinese emperor was the supreme leader of all of the countries surrounding China, including Japan (until 1540, when Japan ended this relationship), Joseon Korea, Vietnam, the Ryukyus, Burma, and so on. The maritime space served as a channel through which neighbouring countries could send their tribute to China and receive the Chinese emperor’s conferment of kingship in recognition of the sovereign powers of these client states. Moreover, the oceanic space offered a means of learning about Chinese culture. During the Sui and Tang dynasties, when Imperial China was at its peak, Japan sent missions consisting of scholars, monks, and students to acquire knowledge about Chinese culture and civilisation. The East China Sea in East Asia was analogous to ‘an East Asian Mediterranean’.Footnote ²¹ In the centuries that followed, as Japan continued to maintain loose relations with China under the tributary system, the sea presented the only channel for close commercial links with China.

Imperial China still faced outside threats, however, the most frequent being challenges and harassment by northern and western nomads, who had tormented the emperors of previous dynasties. Unlike continental East Asia, Imperial China faced little if any threat from the seas. Although pirates and smugglers were engaged in harassment and looting along the Chinese coast, this activity – unlike the riots of the peripheral barbarians in continental Asia – was of only marginal significance and was incapable of subverting an entire empire. In the circumstances, Imperial China, as the dominant power in East Asia, did not develop into a maritime power as the European countries did. If we apply the definitions of maritime state and maritime power to Qing China, we find that, to borrow historian Ronald Po’s words, China’s Manchurian court regarded the maritime space as little more than its blue frontier.Footnote ²² As for Japan, although Western ideas, knowledge, and weapons had been introduced there via the seas, the Daimyo (powerful Japanese magnates) preferred to conquer others and consolidate their power on the Japanese archipelagos rather than expand Japan’s influence in maritime East Asia. If we shift our attention to the Korean Peninsula, we can find that the main foreign policy goal of Joseon Korea, long a client state of Imperial China, was to strike a balance between China and Japan. The maritime space served as a means of access that allowed Joseon Korea to maintain its subtle relations with its two stronger neighbours.Footnote ²³ Thus, despite China’s long coastline, Japan’s archipelago, and Korea’s peninsula providing these countries with suitable geography for becoming sea powers, their land-oriented approaches meant they did not evolve into maritime powers prior to the Western invasion from the seas in the nineteenth century. The maritime space provided a platform for interaction between these maritime states and a window on Western ideas. No one was attempting to corner leadership of maritime East Asia. Within the context of Imperial China’s tributary system, the western Pacific rim represented the periphery of the civilised world.

At one point, the western Pacific rim might have become the focus of competition between two local empires, Qing China and Meiji Japan, but this did not occur. It was because China was languishing following its rout at sea by Japan in the First Sino–Japanese War in 1894–1895, as a consequence of which it abandoned its management of the seas and did not revive its naval forces. Without serious competitors, the ocean could not function as a key platform for the pursuit of power. What did happen is Japan obtained the colony of Taiwan, which occupies a geographically critical position in maritime East Asia. Then, following Japan’s victory in the Russo–Japanese War in 1905, Japan’s hegemony in maritime East Asia was complete. On the strength of these victories at sea, we are more often than not inclined to regard Imperial Japan as a maritime power. If we look at its expansion in the twentieth century from the Korean Peninsula to Manchuria and then to north and east China, we can see that, although it was an empire that controlled both land and sea, Japan’s development was obviously land-oriented. This warrants a brief look at the history of Imperial Japan’s navy so that we can better understand the reasons behind its land-oriented development. Meiji Japan established its first fleet in 1889 and the second five years later, but these did not satisfy Emperor Meiji’s ambition to create a fully Westernised Japan.Footnote ²⁴ His government imitated the British Navy and learnt the naval doctrine from the United States, taking its greatest inspiration from the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan.Footnote ²⁵ However, in the making of Meiji Japan, despite being an island country, the navy came not first but second in terms of national defence. This is because the naval clan composed of the Satsuma Domain was suppressed by the budding Japanese army during the 1877 Seinan War.Footnote ²⁶ Japan’s naval officers did not expect to have an offensive navy but rather a defensive naval force in defence of Japan’s coasts.Footnote ²⁷ The Japanese Empire realised that its geographical proximity to Continental Asia was similar to Britain to Europe. Japan regarded Britain as its national model and expected to become ‘the Britain of the East’.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless, Imperial Japan developed into a land-oriented empire. The Japanese scholar Shiraishi Takashi says that Imperial Japan’s continent-oriented policy was formed after it obtained interests in Manchuria following the 1905 Russo–Japanese War and the 1910 Japanese annexation of Korea. Shiraishi suggests, however, that we would be wrong to conclude that Japan was not interested in maritime Asia. It had considered incorporating maritime Asia into the Japanese Empire, but these areas were already occupied by Western powers such as Britain and the Netherlands: Japan had come too late to the game of colonial chess.Footnote ²⁹ Imperial Japan thus did not develop like its Anglo–Japanese Alliance fellow Britain into a maritime power establishing colonies on the other side of the planet in order to project its military, political, economic, and cultural influence. Instead, its land-oriented strategic thinking shaped Meiji Japan into what Sarah C. Paine would call a continental rather than a maritime power,Footnote ³⁰ in which the geographical space of the ocean connected the centre of the empire with its imperial periphery in the East Asia region. I do not deny the formidable strength of Imperial Japan’s naval forces, which, prior to the outbreak of World War II, were ranked third in the world after those of the United States and the United Kingdom. However, we should not equate a country with a strong navy but which emphasises ‘land territorial control or conquest’ with a maritime power.Footnote ³¹ As Paine elaborates, a maritime power cannot disconnect itself from global affairs that are linked to the maritime space. This notwithstanding, Japan did challenge the existing contours of the global maritime order. It not only withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, thus undermining the military balance of power in the Asia–Pacific area, but it also attacked it commerce fellows, including the United States, which had a preponderant navy.Footnote ³² In the 1930s, Imperial Japan understood that it required oil supplies and other strategic raw materials such as rubber in order to maintain its navy; hence it followed its doctrine of Nanshin-ron (southern expansion), according to which it extended its influence to Southeast Asia and the Netherlands East Indies and regarded the East China Sea, South China Sea, and Yellow Sea as its inland waters.Footnote ³³ Japan needed to join up its southern expansion policy with its continent-oriented strategy in order to open a second front in the Southwest Pacific.Footnote ³⁴ Japan’s demand for strategic raw materials led it to advance upon areas it had eschewed during the initial stages of its imperial expansion, but this meant it had to burn its candle at both ends by engaging in combat both on land and at sea, which eventually led to its total collapse.

Following World War II, the preeminent sea power in the western Pacific was not a local ruler in East Asia but a country across the Pacific that lacked the East Asian culture, the United States, as a consequence of its advance to the western Pacific during World War II and the decay of Imperial Japan. Scholarship on the saga of the US Navy during the Pacific War is plentiful, but we should ruminate on how the United States rebuilt the political contours of the western Pacific after its navy crushed the supremacy of Imperial Japan. Unlike Imperial China and Imperial Japan, the United States in the post-war period was not a formal empire, but in post-war East Asia it was essentially an informal empire. There is a close relationship between maritime space, security, and sovereignty, but we still know very little about how the United States shaped its maritime East Asia as it sought to strike a balance between its thalassocracy and its relations with rising local partners.

The conclusion of World War II did not bring long-term peace to East Asia, as another power struggle evolved with the involvement of ascendant local and international powers. The outbreak of war there meant not only the loss of many lives but also a challenge to the existing system and political boundaries and the potential reshuffling of a longstanding international order. Following the Jewel Voice Broadcast of 15 August 1945 and the end of Japan’s control over East Asia on land and at sea, East Asia found itself in a power vacuum. None of the protagonists was prepared for the transition period. Japan, a former empire and East Asia’s sole maritime overlord, saw the demobilisation of its Imperial Navy and was occupied by the Allied powers. China, a country with a large landmass and a long coastline, commenced rebuilding its war-torn society and would soon experience a power struggle between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists. Korea eventually regained its sovereignty from Japan but was divided into two separate parts occupied respectively by the United States and the Soviet Union, who pulled the strings behind the scenes. The local powers of mainland China, the Korean Peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago were overwhelmed by these complicated affairs. The power-pursuit games in China and Korea had commenced and no one had any capacity to spare for the maritime space. This provided the United States, which had become a thalassocracy during the Pacific War, with a platform where it could bring its influence into full play. However, it was no picnic. With the almost simultaneous dissolution of the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany and the emergence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ sudden victory made it a global superpower, but caught Washington on the hop.Footnote ³⁵ Militarily, it meant that the United States had to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining the nascent international order. Whether on land or at sea, it was all new for the Truman administration. As both a Pacific and an Atlantic country, the United States was besieged after the war with vexing questions on both sides. As the Truman administration sketched out its blueprint for a new international order, it needed to take its traditional allies in Europe into account while also building its influence and connections amongst its junior partners in East Asia. In terms of defence priorities, the United States put Asia and the Pacific third after the Atlantic and the Middle East. This Europe-first mindset would be the cornerstone of America’s post-war strategy.Footnote ³⁶

Truman’s Europe-first policy has had profound ramifications for current scholarship on Cold War history because it is believed that the winds of the Cold War did not begin blowing in Asia until the Korean War broke out in 1950.Footnote ³⁷ Maritime East Asia has been categorised by scholars as a marginal area in America’s global strategic thinking. Historians have immersed themselves in regional histories, such as those of China, Japan, and Korea, and shed light on the dynamics of mainland China, the Korean Peninsula, and the Japanese archipelago, providing us with knowledge of how historical developments in these places paved the way for the bipolar structure to come. Accordingly, the function of the maritime space has been relegated to the margins of existing scholarship.

It is this book’s argument that maritime East Asia deserves more scholarly attention, because the gradual development of the Cold War transformed maritime East Asia from a cipher into a point of leverage in America’s global Cold War. If we fail to take geography into consideration, then the voluminous primary sources, personal papers, media resources, and secondary research could merely dazzle us – or cloud our eyes – and we could miss out on what lies behind the deliberations of the key decision-makers in this game. If we shift the historical lens, however, and train it on the maritime space, then the ocean can serve as a mirror that reflects the concerns behind the diplomatic language used to talk about security, sovereignty, and local economic interests. The ocean’s hydrological features did not change as the old times faded away and the new era dawned, but the stories of the seas did change along with the political contours of East Asia. Geographically speaking, this edge, this very periphery of Eurasia, became the frontline of the military and political competition with the Soviet Union, and the Cold War standoff between the US and the USSR led to the seas being shaped into America’s blue rampart against the expansion of Communism. The Chinese Civil War of 1945–1949, which culminated in Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat from the mainland to Taiwan, and the cruel military conflicts of 1950–1953 not only led to divided countries in East Asia, they also made the western Pacific rim restless. This historical evolution reflected the geostrategic value of maritime space when America was designing a blueprint for post-war East Asia. The role played by maritime East Asia gradually shifted from the edge or peripheral area of Imperial China, Japan, and the United States to the heart of the Cold War in East Asia, where it became an arena for out-and-out power games between local and world powers.

Outline of the Chapters

The destruction of the Japanese Empire resulted in a power vacuum in maritime East Asia. The United States took advantage of this to shape the geopolitical contours of the emerging Cold War. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, I challenge the current narrative that the Cold War in East Asia originated in the Chinese Civil War or the Korean War. If we shift the platform of history from land to sea, we can see that signs of the Cold War appeared in maritime East Asia in the immediate post-war period. In these chapters, I argue that the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union spurred the US Navy to adopt a forward-deployed posture of defence. The struggling between superpowers, more often than not, originated from mutual suspicion that one had intention to destroy one another so national security based on military capability was ‘a prerequisite for achieving other goals’ when playing an international chess game.Footnote ³⁸ The forward-deployed naval strategy sought to deploy US naval forces in strategically valued harbours around the periphery of the Soviet Union so as to politically and militarily deter the Kremlin from extending its influence in the western Pacific. Moscow’s control over Port Arthur and Dalian in the north-eastern part of China led the US Navy to headquarter the Seventh Fleet at the port of Qingdao (Tsingtao), which it treated as a hub in defence of America’s international security in maritime East Asia. The US Navy aimed to strike a power balance in maritime East Asia by preventing its potential adversary: the Soviet Union from becoming a regional hegemon.Footnote ³⁹

Nascent Cold War rivalry was already discernible in the western Pacific rim by August 1945, but this book argues that the Truman administration’s ambiguous China policy blurred the contours of America’s maritime East Asia. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, I take a detailed look at decision-makers’ plans for unified commands in the Pacific from 1947 onwards and elaborate on the debates within the Truman administration over naval deployment in post-war East Asia and its overall international security goals. I further argue that the wartime competition for leadership in the Pacific between Douglas MacArthur and Chester W. Nimitz did not end with World War II but persisted in the immediate post-war period. The United States regarded the Pacific as its lake, but the United States’ Navy–Army division resulted in it being a divided lake in terms of authority: the Army led the Far East Command and the Navy held the Pacific Command according to the 1947 unified command plan. These chapters also show the inextricable link between international and regional turbulence and America’s construction of unified commands in the Pacific. Mainland China, which the US Navy chose as a springboard where it could build its maritime order in post-war East Asia, was not included in either the Far East Command or the Pacific Command. I examine how mistrust between the US and the USSR and the impending fratricidal war between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong influenced American deliberations on building America’s maritime East Asia and analyse how the United States adapted its defensive posture when its wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek lost control over mainland China in 1949 as a result of the Chinese Civil War.

Chiang’s defeat destabilised international politics in East Asia. In Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, I examine the change in Washington’s maritime strategic deployment in the 1950s following its loss of China. In Chapter 5, I argue that the outbreak of the Korean War drove the United States to rethink the geostrategic value of the Navy in the maritime space. The US Navy demonstrated its capability of sea–air warfare to delay Kim Il-sung’s pace of occupying the whole Korean Peninsula when the US/UN ground troops underwent tragic setback during the first three months of the war. The Navy’s contributions were not only to save time for the Army to launch Operation Chromite but also to provide logistics support which laid the groundwork to push North Korea back to the thirty-eighth parallel. The US Navy successfully lent credence to its indispensable significance in defence of America’s security in maritime East Asia and persuaded Washington to adopt a more sea-oriented approach in its strategic thinking.

In Chapter 6, I then turn to Eisenhower’s continuation of Truman’s sea-oriented strategy in defence of East Asia, which I dissect in order to demonstrate that Eisenhower’s New-Look strategy crafted in 1953 further guided US military deployment in the Pacific by reforming the organisational structure in the western Pacific rim in 1957. These chapters also demonstrate how Washington came to appreciate the western Pacific as an indispensable geostrategic space and how American strategy prioritised regulation of the sea routes safeguarding this natural barrier. In addition, I re-evaluate the current understanding of the 1950s crises in East Asia, particularly the Korean War and the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. I argue that, following these crises, the United States reappraised the western Pacific rim and came to regard it as the most strategically valuable area of the Pacific. It reshuffled the organisational structure of the Pacific Command once again by strengthening its naval connection with its allies, particularly Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as these were choke points on the front lines of the Cold War. The geographical space of the sea not only enabled America to control its hub-and-spokes alliance system in the western Pacific, it also allowed it to maintain the Pax Americana against the Communists across the ocean, a pax which remained in place until the United States ended official relations with Taiwan in 1979.

Military force offered a straightforward means of deconstructing a political order, as well as an effective means of building a new one. Although the maritime space is the province of the Navy, if we limit the scope of our investigation to America’s naval activities, we would render the scenery of maritime East Asia a lifeless monochrome. In addition to military strength, political scientist Stephen M. Walt reminds us that a national power is also composed of economic capability and natural resources.Footnote ⁴⁰ We thus add colour to the canvas by way of what Eric Grove and Geoffrey Till describe as ‘foreign, economic and political circumstances’ along with local historical development.Footnote ⁴¹ By shifting from the military to the legal and economic aspects of this history, we can enrich our understanding of Washington’s maritime policy in Cold War East Asia. Thus, this book also sketches out the interaction between the United States and its local partners in maritime East Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, from a non-military perspective. In Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, I argue that US maritime policy focused not only on the construction of geostrategic space but also on the international political arena. I first analyse how the 1958 and 1960 United Nations (UN) Conferences on the International Law of the Sea, intended for legal discussion, fell hostage to the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. I then look at how the United States sought a legal basis for its maritime dominance at these UN maritime conferences.

Although sea-oriented strategic thinking and a Navy-led Pacific Command enabled the United States to maintain its thalassocracy in East Asia with the support of its allies, it is important to consider whether America’s hub-and-spokes allies were still on Washington’s side when it was confronting Soviet challenges to the international law of the sea. These chapters demonstrate that the Americans found it hard to obtain support from their East Asian allies at the conferences due to matters of local sovereignty and local interest. I look at the motivation behind Washington’s decision to change its stance on the breadth of territorial waters and how its East Asian allies responded in turn.

In Chapter 9 and Chapter 10, I adopt a non-military perspective in my argument regarding America’s policy and consider the exploration of underwater natural resources and its relationship to local sovereignty in order to depict the multiple roles played by the sea in America’s strategic approach to East Asia. Chapter 9 argues that America’s move to take control of fishing resources after World War II presaged the competition over maritime natural resources that has come to define intra-East Asian competition in the western Pacific from the Cold War to the present day. Fisheries are not the only maritime natural resources subject to management. The East Asian countries had also begun to recognise the significance of oil reserves that might facilitate their recovery from the destruction of World War II. The possible oil reserves under the seabed of the East China Sea indicated in the 1969 Emery report convinced the United States to cooperate with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, but they also led to competition between these countries for ownership of these natural resources. In Chapter 10 I argue that the volatile international situation and the changing nature of great-power politics created a dynamic in maritime East Asia that had far-reaching consequences for both America’s alliance network and Washington’s naval deployment in the western Pacific. This chapter analyses how Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo attempted to jointly explore oil resources by putting aside questions of the ownership of disputed islands. It also examines the role that the United States played in these international cooperation projects and why its involvement inevitably accelerated the breakdown of the progress made by its three allies. America’s changing China policy in the late 1960s when the Nixon administration revised its relations with Beijing also transformed its perception of the western Pacific. I argue that the United States viewed the sea as a dangerous geographical space that could trigger all-out conflict with China and had thus begun to regard the maritime space of East Asia as a buffer zone that would allow it to maintain a distance from China as opposed to regarding it as a geostrategic barrier for containment. These political and military contours of maritime East Asia were arguably a product of the interaction between Washington’s domestic and foreign policies and the internal dynamics of the East Asian countries.