"americanism" and Strategic Security: the Pacific Basin, 1943-1947

Friedman, Hal M (1997). ""americanism" and Strategic Security: the Pacific Basin, 1943-1947". American Dipolomacy. 2 (3).

• Has attachment: File:HCQHPTP8.pdf

Abstract: In the mid-1940s,the United States set out to guarantee its future security in the Pacific and East Asia by taking direct control over many of the Pacific Islands conquered from Japan during the latter part of World War Two. Several factors convinced American policy makers and planners that future American security in the region could only be guaranteed by unilateral and virtually complete control over islands groups such as Micronesia: These included their perceptions of a failed inter-war treaty system, the trauma of Pearl Harbor and the early defeats in the Pacific War, the costs of the island-hopping campaigns of 1942- 1945, and rising tensions with the Soviet Union. Physical control of the region was to be secured by sprinkling the Pacific Basin with strategic bases in areas such as Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, Micronesia, and Japan, in addition to patrolling the area with powerful U.S. naval and air forces. Control was to be achieved by exporting to the Pacific Islanders ideas about the “American way of life.” Information on American-style politics, economics, and cultural values was seen as a strategic security tool in its own right...