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Although Conroy attends without prejudice to what today we call structural Marxist approaches—he calls them “economic” or “socialist,” alluding to Scott Nearing, William Appleman Williams, and Gabriel Kolko’s structural analyses of imperialism, for example—and although he never dismisses their relevance, he restricts himself for the most part to “the documents,” primarily from the foreign offices of Japan, the United States, and Britain, and whether they verify or falsify such theories. From this we learn something of the staying power of Conroy’s approach. He does not attempt a radical or outsider’s interpretation of American involvement in East Asia and the Pacific that may be fashionable for a decade or two: he attempts an enduring revision of the standard interpretation. In this way, his narrative escapes the obsolescence of fashion, while incorporating what we might call elements of changing interpretive trends, including structuralism and postmodernism. This is not because Conroy in his personal life is politically neutral or apolitical; actually, if American politics had not lurched to the Right, he would probably have preferred to be in and out of diplomatic service himself— not only recording events as a diplomatic historian but shaping them in the State Department, if Henry Wallace had succeeded FDR, Stevenson succeeded Truman, Kennedy and Bowles prevailed over the national security bureaucracies, and McGovern succeeded Nixon. As it turned out, he has always tried to adjust to the diplomatic opportunities and challenges of the real situations that developed, despite the players in charge, as in opportunities and challenges faced by diplomats and the State Department from Dean Acheson to Condoleeza Rice, for example.
In his work on the period 1898–1941, Conroy examines the papers of diplomatic players in the construction of American and Japanese, and in a few cases British, accounts of what was going on from the Open Door policy to the Pacific War. From the perspectives of these sources, his study seems at first to be primarily about the United States and Japan; yet in the end, it is really as much about China, which appears throughout as a talked about or fought over. He supplements this empirical diplomatic history with a look at contemporary ways in which the story appears in history books: most notably, Griswold’s aforementioned The Far Eastern Policy of the United States, which, he notes, “won instant acclaim, as the best, the standard” work on the topic.