Soon after the American Revolution, ?certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities. Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

The Far Eastern policy pursued during the Roosevelt-Truman administrations has long been the subject of spirited controversy among historians. This volume, first published in 1963, is the result of seven years of intensive research into a mass of documentary data dealing with the Communist conquest of China. “Professor Kubek discusses with unusual candor and clear vision the many mistakes of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations with reference to the Far East. There are new data and fresh interpretations that lend additional evidence to support the contentions of earlier writers that the diplomacy of the Administrations of Roosevelt and Truman was disastrous in the extreme. The strange actions of General Marshall in China, and his blind policy while Secretary of State, were chief factors in the loss of China to the Communists. In a noteworthy chapter that all Americans should read, Professor Kubek traces in damning detail the tragic role that Marshall played in the fall of Nationalist China. “This is a volume that will earn the sharpest criticisms of the motley hordes that crowded the Roosevelt and Truman bandwagons, but it is a must book for any American who wants to know why the present sawdust Caesar, Khrushchev, can insult at will the President of the United States and can hurl continual threats to “bury” all Americans. Soviet militate might is the direct product of billions of Democratic Lend-Lease aid, coddling of Communists in high places in the American Government, and failure to understand the basic drives of world Communism. Never before in our history was Presidential leadership so devoid of vision, and never before had the mistakes of our Chief Executives been so fraught with peril to our nation. Read this book and then begin to worry about how Americans will fare in the next decade.”—Charles Callan Tansill, Professor Emeritus of Diplomatic History, Georgetown University (Foreword)