Read an Excerpt
Asia First
China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism
By Joyce Mao The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-25285-8
CHAPTER 1
Up from Isolationism: The Conservative Dilemma and the Chinese Solution
In the spring of 1946, as American wartime optimism began to turn into postwar anxiety, an unusual petition appeared in major newspapers and periodicals. The "Manchurian Manifesto" claimed the United States owed a special debt to China because the latter was "the victim both of our long appeasement of Japan and of our unpreparedness": The agreements reached at the Yalta conference the previous year—made "behind China's back"—granted USSR troops access to the province of Manchuria during the final weeks of the war. Now the Soviet army was giving Mao's Communists a vital advantage in the Chinese civil war and the United States should "insist on the strict observance of promises made to China." Defenders would say that Yalta negotiations took place before the certainty of the atomic bomb, and Franklin Roosevelt had sought to bring the Soviet Union into the war against Japan in the spirit of realpolitik diplomacy. On the other hand, postwar critics charged that the Yalta agreement seriously compromised the moral leadership of the United States and imperiled the Open Door tradition of special friendship between the United States and China.
Drawn up by the American China Policy Association, the manifesto blamed Americans, not Joseph Stalin, for China's "betrayal" at Yalta. The corresponding argument that the United States was responsible for China's postwar destiny made it a classic example of American orientalism. Meanwhile, the far-reaching appeal of such paternalism was reflected by the variety of public figures endorsing the manifesto's claims. Numbering sixty-two in all, they ranged from Time-Life magnate Henry Luce and Congressman Walter Judd (R-MN) to the socialist Norman Thomas and American Federation of Labor president William Green to publisher Alfred A. Knopf and Mrs. Wendell Willkie. The names of well-known Chiang Kai-shek supporters, such as Judd (a former medical missionary in China) and Luce (a son of China missionaries), were unsurprising, but the petition was not intended only for the eyes of the converted. It beseeched all Americans to rectify the wrong against a wartime ally: "Will the American people, at the strongest moment in their history, accept a Russian policy in Asia which we rejected in the case of Germany and Japan even when we were weak?" Anybody, whether a public figure or private citizen, had the power to change the course that had been set at Yalta.
As the Manchurian Manifesto showed, disapproval of recent US China policy could be heard across the political spectrum. However, by 1950, the most vocal and organized critics came from the GOP right. Their efforts would pay off as "conservative foreign policy" ceased to be considered an oxymoron. Before World War II, few of them showed concern for global diplomacy, let alone a country with which the United States shared virtually no trade and a relatively slender ethnic heritage. The mainstream of American conservative ideology dictated that federal power should limit its concerns to national affairs. Conservatives of the old guard recognized a fundamental shift had occurred after Pearl Harbor, but they had difficulty adjusting to the nation's new interventionism; as a result, a presumption that isolationism was a major tenet of rightwing thought lingered beyond the start of the Cold War.
Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, nicknamed "Mr. Republican," embodied that old guard. The son of former president William Howard Taft, he was a well-respected public figure even if he did not possess the most sparkling personality. H. L. Mencken once observed, "Taft is a pleasant enough fellow of very agreeable manners and gabbing with him was pleasant enough, but he certainly failed to inflame me with any conviction that he was a man of destiny." What Mencken deemed to be a deficiency, many other Americans considered to be comforting and honest. Shortly after being elected to the US Senate in 1938, Taft gained a devoted national following, his supporters heralding him as the highest example of integrity and reason. "I look at that man and I see everything which my father taught me to hold good," affirmed one Idaho matron.
To supporters and critics alike, Taft's reputation rested with his positions on national issues like the New Deal and labor. Foreign policy was not his natural forte, and his negative positions on postwar issues like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) solidified impressions that he was a strict isolationist. However, even before 1941, Taft did come to recognize that literal adherence to the Monroe Doctrine was hardly an appropriate, or practicable, response to the United States' growing place in the world.
The juxtaposition between widely held presumptions and a subtler, personal evolution has led to widely varying interpretations of Taft's place within the history of US foreign policy. Eric Goldman's sweeping narrative of the immediate postwar period, The Crucial Decade (1956), zeroed in on the senator as the unquestioned leader of the Republican right ("Taftites"), a faction that awkwardly grappled with foreign affairs at the beginning of the Cold War. In his account, Taft was a politician beset by circumstance, a man who had but little choice other than to change, however unwilling. Conservative historian Russell Kirk and coauthor James McClellan painted a more proactive portrait in their 1967 biography. They credited Taft's desire to protect American institutions from actions taken in the name of "an amorphous international 'democracy'" and framed it within global contexts. Their narrative ardently defended Taft against charges of irregularity on foreign policy, arguing that his shifting stances were no more inconsistent than those of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, or Dean Acheson. Change was not a symptom of an isolationist turned diplomatic dilettante, but, rather, a sign of flexible adaptability.
More recently, scholars interested in alternative forms of internationalism have cited Taft as a significant example of how conservatives engaged with foreign policy as the nation stood on the brink of World War II. Christopher Nichols describes how during the 1930s, the senator adhered to a platform of "internationally engaged isolationist principles," including domestic reform, peaceful international engagement, and avoidance of foreign treaties and intervention in wars—a philosophy shared by public figures on both the right and the left. In his extensive study on Taft and foreign policy, Clarence Wunderlin traces how the senator's worldview attempted to balance domestic traditionalism with the demands of global circumstances: Taft had a "great reverence" for international law, a trait he inherited from his father. That respect led him to practice a conservative internationalism that supported certain forms of collective security and arbitration, even as it retained a distinct antistatism and was wielded as a political weapon.
Taft has received a good amount of academic attention lately, but for much of the time he was the GOP right's standard-bearer, the finer points of early conservative internationalism were overlooked. Before Pearl Harbor, while Americans weighed the prospect of whether their government would openly abandon its neutrality, conservatives bore the label of outright isolationism since declaration of war was widely considered to be the only path to overseas engagement. Similarly, after 1945, Democrats' dominance of the diplomatic sphere meant liberal containment was the most obvious form of long-term intervention while challenges to its grand strategy were dismissed as neither grand nor strategic.
Outmanned and in the political minority as the Cold War took shape, conservatives could either play tightly defined roles in foreign policy (as Sen. Arthur Vandenberg did) or take exploratory steps on their own. Taft's outspoken criticism of the Nuremberg trials showed that his views complicated widely accepted definitions of isolationism. He argued that the trials were "instruments of government policy, determined months before" rather than instruments of justice; the United States' participation in what seemed a predetermined verdict via ex post facto laws was an affront to bedrock constitutional principles. It was a highly unpopular view that made Taft a target of backlash from the press and colleagues. Nevertheless, the argument that the United States' tolerance for proceedings like Nuremberg was dangerous, especially in parallel with the nation's new leadership status, resonated within key circles. Corroboration from legal experts like Robert G. Neumann and Justice William O. Douglas later provided mitigating vindication, as did a laudatory portrait by John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage (1955). While not enough to sway either public perception or a radical overhaul of conservative ideology, Taft's position as well as the support it received represented a small but important measure of early revision.
Profound change toward an original internationalism within the entire Republican right was bolstered when senior leaders like Taft adopted an Asia First position in the wake of the Chinese Communist Revolution. This chapter pursues a rather different portrayal than John Paton Davies's recollection of Taft as "an influential conservative who otherwise displayed slight interest in East Asia." Using the senator as a vantage point, it examines conservatives' turn to China during the earliest years of the Cold War.
Because he ran for both the White House and the Senate after 1945, Taft's personal transition occurred in uniquely plain view. The press scrutinized his positions, and certainly he reflected important shifts within conservative thought. As U.S. News & World Report explained, "Some Republicans stand to his left. Quite a few are to his right. But, on most issues, the Ohio Senator is so close to the middle that when Republicans try to find a compromise they move into the position he has held all the time." Neither on the cutting edge nor obstinately immoveable, he was a barometer, while his status and leadership in the GOP Congress (which also included high-ranking former isolationists like Sen. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, Sen. Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, Rep. Joseph Martin Jr. of Massachusetts, and Sen. Homer Capeheart of Indiana) helped legitimize conservatism's approach to foreign relations during the late 1940s.
Although that group of Republican conservatives may have been relative novices in the field of foreign policy, they did not consider their own brand of internationalism simply as a political tool. Their overarching goal was to project a specific vision of US superpower to the world, one that emphasized preservation of American unilateralism in international affairs, a strong military defense state, and a commitment to winning the conflict with global communism as quickly as possible. The story of how events in East Asia merged with postwar conservatism's foreign and domestic concerns was one of the most significant subtexts of postwar national politics. Conservative internationalism did not emerge easily, but its development was imperative as the pace of the Cold War accelerated.
A Quickening
The escalation of civil war in China meant a rapid deterioration of American interests in mainland Asia after 1945. Despite the country's Allied status and the Guomindang's openness toward the West, forging a course of action ranked among the most difficult of challenges facing US policymakers. The outcome of the Marshall Mission (1946), resumption of armed conflict between the Communists and the Nationalists (1946–47), and charges of pervasive corruption within Chiang's regime obfuscated any clear or speedy solution. At the same time, those events provided early opportunities for Republican conservatives to voice misgivings about the direction of America's Cold War policy.
George Marshall's mission to China was a case in point. Its purpose was to broker a working agreement between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang. Critics of the administration interpreted the secretary of state's objective as misguided at best; at worst, it tolerated communist expansion. In any case, the mission was virtually impossible to achieve given the circumstances, and Marshall failed to bring about a resolution. Frustrated, he returned to the United States from Nanjing in January 1947, highlighting American ineffectualness in China. After the forcefulness of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan later in the year, conservative hardliners could increasingly argue that Democrats prioritized Europe and the Mediterranean while neglecting mainland Asia. China was not even the first priority in East Asia, considering the weight thrown behind Japanese occupation. Criticism implicated the federal state as well: The goal of brokering peace between the Guomindang and the CCP led to allegations that a "Red cell" of China experts within the State Department had sabotaged US policy by advocating a coalition government in the first place.
However, concerns regarding Chiang's efficacy lingered as rumors of his regime's oppressive tactics traveled across the Pacific, making mass aid to the Guomindang a complicated option. One letter to Taft from Chinese nationals included an enclosure addressed to Chiang: "You must know that the country is paralyzed from your twenty years of political tutelage. You have trained many political slaves, whose political philosophy is dictatorship." Contrary to the positive public image Chiang supporters promoted in the United States, even ex-isolationists were aware that the Guomindang regime was deeply flawed with questionable popularity among the Chinese. Some conservatives made statements about Chiang that echoed doubts long harbored by liberal internationalists. One of Taft's close advisors even agreed with Owen Lattimore, describing the Guomindang as "feudalistic" and unable to understand American-style capitalism. As late as 1946, the senator himself characterized China as a "dictatorship."
Once the Cold War crystallized, whether or not to support Chiang was a question answered in Manichean terms: Mao was a Communist, and Chiang was not. Therefore, Chiang should receive support from the United States. It was a message that met with general approval in the lead-up to the 1948 election. The lack of a definitive policy from the incumbent administration meant Truman faced harsh criticism on China from Republican opponents. Both GOP candidates—the conservative Taft and the moderate Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York—targeted Asia as a weak point.
The Republican emphasis on China did not go unnoticed. In February, journalist Lowell Mellett classified criticism of China policy as a united, partisan attack. While he saw no real difference between Dewey's and Taft's motivations, he did note a significant change in the latter's position on overseas intervention: "Mr. Taft hasn't named his figure, but he doesn't seem as economy-minded toward China as he is toward Europe." His was an aggressive position intended "to show that the administration isn't tough enough in its attitude toward Communism."
Taft was indeed busy revamping his stance on foreign relations. At an appearance in Detroit early in the year, he characterized bipartisan foreign policy as a failure that "resulted from the character of the New Deal administration." He went on to give a (somewhat reserved) endorsement of Chiang: "[H]e is today, regardless of his faults, the only hope to prevent the spread of Communism in China. The Republican tradition of the Open Door and his own belief that the United States should be concerned with Asia first provided stronger motivation: "I believe very strongly that the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace and safety than is Europe. We should at least be as much concerned about the advance of Communism to the shores of the Pacific ... as we are to its possible advance to the shores of the Atlantic."
At that point, China was just a means to a diversified platform, not a moral or emotional issue for Taft. One indicator was his lack of faith in the Chinese people themselves. He classified the country as "ready to accept dictatorship" and "likely to acquiesce." He trusted the United States' capability to prevent catastrophe, not China's resistance to Communism. Far from entrenched in ideology, his criticism of Asia policy was mercenary, designed to keep up with Dewey and more established internationalists.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Asia First by Joyce Mao. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
