|
|
Although Dollar Diplomacy makes no predictions as such, the prognosis rings clear from its tone. American expansion will proceed as long as and in such degree as American capitalism grows, with Latin America its immediate and most obvious victim, but the Far East and Near East also (in 1925) are well along the road to bondage. This is strictly an economic interpretation of the process, and while it shows that political and military intervention follow where economic opportunity leads, the well springs are definitely economic: the capitalist system as operating in the United States.
We shall return to this economic explanation of American expansion later, giving due attention to its more sophisticated forms, as advanced by such postwar historians as William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko. Here, without implying endorsement, we observe that more than any of the contemporary so-called standard interpretations previously noted, it anticipated the accelerating Pacific expansion of the United States. However, it did not anticipate either the Pacific War or the emergence of a People’s Republic of China.
So we begin to revise, realizing that we must consider not only Griswold’s study and the other standard works, but also the whole framework of American thinking about East Asian involvements, and the course of events themselves require our attention. A study broad in scope follows, beginning at about the same point as Griswold’s, in 1898 and extending through the Pacific War and beyond, with Communist China, Vietnam, and other postwar problems of American relations with the Far East that he and others failed to anticipate.
Since the scope will be broad, the depth will be not shallow, it is hoped, but somewhat uneven. Some problems and episodes that seem to merit depth we will probe quite deeply, as much so as the resources of the author and availability of the documentation permit. Others we will give only the once-over-lightly treatment, and some we will not touch at all.