| Chapter 2: | The Open Door and Yesterday’s China |
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This is a strong indictment, indeed, of our friendly, though admittedly blundering, Open Door policy. And implicit in it lurks an unexpressed, but haunting idea; after all, the United States did ultimately back up with force, did go to war for those “legalistic-moralistic” and utterly nebulous open door principles—in the Pacific War itself. Kennan himself did not suggest that the Pacific War was a war for an open door in China. But another revisionist, William L. Neumann, made the point when he responded to the question, “Why war?” “It was American support of China—American refusal to repudiate the principles of Hay, Hughes, Stimson, and Hull,” he responded. He then proceeded to develop the point that though preservation of the open door gave America purpose in going to war with Japan in 1941, “few Americans ever pointed out that the doors were to be kept open for the advantage of foreign interests,” and the rise of Chinese nationalism already pointed toward a “closed door.”5
Leaving aside the question whether American infatuation with the Open Door policy led the United States willy-nilly into the Pacific War, let us introduce a second broadside attack on the hitherto innocent doctrine. In 1959 William Appleman Williams blasted it as empire building, not pure and simple but even more nefarious than that, as a subtle and ingenious device for building an “informal empire” of worldwide proportions. He said,