| Chapter 2: | The Open Door and Yesterday’s China |
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It remained for post–Pacific War scholarship to go beyond that milk-toast criticism of the Open Door policy, which said that it was fine as far as it went, but too bad no one would really back it up. George F. Kennan leveled the first big guns in his Charles R. Walgreen Foundation lectures at the University of Chicago in 1950. Kennan considered it not only the classic example of “legalistic-moralistic” sentimentality running “like a red skein through our foreign policy of the last fifty years,” but also, he thought, the Open Door policy had wrecked any chances for rational and reasonable settlements, taking account the realities of international politics in the Far East. It had permitted American statesmen to assume
that whatever was uttered or urged in the name of moral principle bore with it no specific responsibility on the part of he who urged it, even though the principle might be of questionable applicability to the situation at hand and the practical effects of adherence to it drastic and far-reaching. If others failed to heed us, we would cause them to appear in ungraceful postures before the eyes of world opinion. If, on the other hand, they gave heed to our urgings, they would do so at their own risk; we would not feel bound to help them with the resulting problems.
It was in this spirit that we hacked away, year after year, decade after decade, at the positions of other powers on the mainland of Asia, and above all the Japanese, in the unshakable belief that, if our principles were commendable, the consequences would not be other than happy and acceptable. But rarely could we be lured into a discussion of the real quantities involved.
Kennan continues,
I cannot say that Pearl Harbor might have been avoided had we been over a long period of time more circumspect in our attitudes toward the requirements of their position…[but] it must be admitted that we did very little to exploit this possibility…It is an ironic fact that today [1950] 95% of our past objectives in Asia are ostensibly in large measure achieved.