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The Difference Culture Makes
| Article
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10411 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1993 |
4,998 Words |
| Author
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
THE PACIFIC CENTURY
Frank Gibney
New York: Scribners, 1992
596 pp., $40.00
In 1941 the Time-Life magnate, Henry Luce, an ardent advocate of U.S. involvement in Asia, suggested that World War II would mark the start of an American century. There would be a vast expansion of U.S. power and influence of all sorts throughout the world, he said, and this would be a good thing. Frank Gibney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute of Santa Barbara and a well-known expert on both Asia and the former communist countries of Europe, was once a Time-Life employee. Although no unreserved admirer of his old boss, he insists that, although the term American Century was often twisted and unjustly maligned as chauvinistic, Luce was right in his day.
But that day is now long past. We now face a Pacific Century. The destiny of the world, and particularly the United States, will increasingly be determined in the lands encircling the Pacific Ocean, and especially in the densely populated and rapidly advancing countries of East and Southeast (Pacific) Asia. Unfortunately, as Gibney notes, Americans remain cultural and traditionally remote from the very peoples with whom we share a future. Americans have been more interested in Europe and the Middle East than in what used to be called the "Far" East.
Although he does not explore this point, in some ways the relative lack of interest in Asia in recent decades is a new trend and may not be entirely rational. Partly, perhaps, it is a reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War, which dragged on long enough to sicken even the most hardened. Yet it is also true that, as Edwin Reischauer once observed, the United States and Japan happen to be neighbors--the "world's most distant neighbors," to be sure, but neighbors nevertheless. And disinterest in Japan and other Asian competitors recalls how Americans in the 1930s, instead of studying the growing Japanese threat, stuck their heads in the sand and ridiculed the Japanese. Our involvement across the Pacific is actually a good deal older than our connection with the Middle East. American ships traded, whaled, and explored in that great ocean from the beginning of the republic, but involvement in the Middle East dates mainly from World War II: Oil, the Soviet threat, and the Arab-Israeli conflict drew the United States into the area.
Gibney grumbles, once or twice, that Americans have remained Eurocentric in
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