Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

Why can't 🇺🇸 let 🇯🇵, 🇹🇼, 🇰🇷, and most of East Asia be dominated by 🇨🇳?

Let's talk about the "Grand Area" and its importance to US foreign policy.

[THREAD]

To understand what the "Grand Area" is and its importance for US foreign policy since World War II, lets go back to the end of World War I.
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Following World War I, the United States was content to let the world do its own thing, both politically (see Senate rejecting League of Nations)...

...and economically (see Smoot-Hawley Tariff).

That doesn't mean the US was isolationist. Not at all, either politically (See Briand-Kellog pact)....
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...or economically (see Dawes Plan, named after Charles Dawes).

But the US wasn't an active globe-spanning internationalist nation either. It acted, if not like a "normal country", then at least like a normal major power.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

Indeed, even once Japan, Italy, and Germany became militarily aggressive in the mid-to-late 1930s, the US was still largely fine to let the world do its thing.

Such a sentiment is what fed into the original "America First" campaign

So what happened to change thinking within US foreign policy circles?

This 👇

As @stephenwertheim writes in his book "Tomorrow, the World", the suddenness of France's defeat (6 weeks) shocked the US foreign policy community.
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When coupled with Germany now militarily turning its sights on Britain...

...the possibility emerged that a key market of US trade was now threatened to be completely closed off.

As much as US foreign policy had been based on "letting the world do it's thing", that approach assumed the US could freely trade globally.
amazon.com/Shaped-War-Tra…

While the US was still more than a year away from officially entering the war, the US government began taking actions.

That included planning. Specifically, the State Department commissioned @CFR_org to conduct a series of studies on the US needs, both during and after the war.

One of those studies focused on the economic needs of the United States.

The starting point of the report is acknowledging that the US economy depends on trade

Given that Germany was now militarily controlling Europe, the goal of the report was to figure out the global economic area -- excluding Europe --that could sustain the US.

The Western Hemisphere alone was not enough.

It lacked the export markets (especially offered by the UK) and raw materials (particularly those accessed via South Asia) required by the US

Instead, the area had to be expanded out, both to the East and West (explicitly excluding the Soviet Union). This global area deemed vital to the US economy was called "the Grand Area"

Essentially, the Grand Area was largely everything on this map, except for red areas and the black areas in Europe and Africa (this is a map showing the political alignment of the world in July 1941 -- the time that the report was written).

What might surprise some is that Japan was included...even though it was aligned with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The report acknowledged that including Japan could pose a challenge.

Critically, the report states that the area must be "defended". It is silent on how, but acknowledges that it will require military and diplomatic efforts (and that those factored into defining the area)

In sum, for the US to be economically secure, a substantial portion of the globally economy had to be secure. Only the US could do that.
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As the War evolved, so did the definition of the Grand Area. The excluded parts were no longer both the Nazi and Soviet zones, but just the Soviet zones.

Hmm, origins of the Cold War?
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The idea of the US needing to take an active role in supporting and defending a key portion of the global economy fed into the planning conferences during the war, most notably Bretton Woods.
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Given the composition of the Grand Area, one can see why there was a perception that the US "lost" China when the Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949

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Indeed, some have gone as far as to argue that the need to secure the Grand Area contributed to US involvement in Vietnam.

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…

Let's bring this discussion back to the point that opened this thread.

One should see how the idea of a "Grand Area" could feed into the view that the US must not allow another power, in Europe or Asia, dominate a region that is part of that area.

This is an argument against allowing "spheres of influence" between the US and China.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…

Indeed, the "Grand Area" idea is central to US policy being focused on maintaining "an Open World"
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In short, so long as the US defines its national economic interests as requiring the maintenance of a global "Grand Area", the US will perceive itself as having to stay militarily and political involved in East Asia (and beyond)

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