Arming-East-Asia-Deterring-China/dp/1682478513/ref=monarch_sidesheet">Arming East Asia: Deterring China in the Early Cold War
By Eric Setzekorn
(Naval Institute Press, 348 pages, $30)
The more you reflect on history, the better Dwight Eisenhower as a president looks. Liberal historians and political scientists, enthralled with Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, portrayed Ike, who served in between those two Democrats, as a passive GOP president who relied on John Foster Dulles to conduct foreign policy and Sherman Adams to handle domestic policy. It was only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that scholars, most notably R. Gordon Hoxie (who worked with Eisenhower at Columbia University) and Fred Greenstein, began to reevaluate Eisenhower unencumbered by liberal ideology and partisan politics. Since then, even liberal scholars have mostly ranked Eisenhower in the top 10 of U.S. presidents. Now comes Eric Setzekorn, a historian at the Army’s Center for Military History, with a new and timely book about Eisenhower’s policy toward the Far East.
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In Arming East Asia: Deterring China in the Early Cold War, Setzekorn shows how Eisenhower transformed Truman’s bankrupt East Asian policy into a formidable politico-military deterrent of Communist China’s expansionist ambitions in the region, which the successor Kennedy and Johnson administrations squandered on the battlefields of Vietnam. Eisenhower’s strategy was a forerunner of the Nixon Doctrine of the late 1960s to early 1970s (Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice-president and likely learned from Eisenhower’s success). Ike provided military and economic assistance to key allies in the region — South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, South Vietnam, and Japan — to create what Setzekorn describes as “a robust, defensive force that greatly benefited American foreign policy in the region by serving as a credible deterrent without requiring large numbers of expensive and vulnerable U.S. combat troops.”
It somehow mostly escapes historians and political scientists that Harry Truman’s successful European policies (the Marshall Plan, NATO) were more than offset by his disastrous Asian policies. And the greatest disaster in Asia — and the one we are still dealing with — was the “loss” of China to Mao Zedong’s communist forces. Setzekorn is unsparing in his criticism of what he calls the Truman administrations’ “willful neglect” of East Asia both in terms of politico-military assistance and bureaucratic structure. Setzekorn notes that after the failure of the Marshall mission to negotiate peace talks between the Nationalists and Communists, “Truman did not ask Congress for any aid to China.” Congress thought otherwise and voted to provide significant aid, but only a pittance of the proposed military aid reached the Nationalists before it was suspended near the end of 1948. Setzekorn characterizes this as the Truman administration’s “geostrategic disinterest in East Asia,” which Secretary of State Dean Acheson later tried to cover-up by issuing the infamous China White Paper that laid all of the blame for the loss of China on Chiang-Kai-shek and Nationalist corruption.
Truman partisans and liberal historians ever since have decried the notion that Truman “lost China,” characterizing the phrase as part of gthe era’s “McCarthyism,” but, to paraphrase Truman himself, “the buck stopped” with him. And though Setzekorn fails to mention it, Sen. McCarthy was not wrong about communist influence in the FDR-Truman administrations. The Truman State Department, for example, was littered with East Asian advisers who sympathized with Mao’s supposed “agrarian reformers.” One only has to read The Amerasia Spy Case or James Burnham’s compelling article about the ties between the notorious Institute for Pacific Relations and certain Truman State Department employees in The Freeman to understand their impact on the loss of China.
Setzekorn, however, sees the main fault of Truman’s East Asia policy in a “pattern … of organizational dysfunction and lack of coherent goals” that “hindered American national-security strategy and the development of military relationships with allies.” It was only the outbreak of the Korean War — which came after Truman administration spokesmen told the world that Korea was not a part of America’s defense perimeter in Asia — that significant military assistance flowed to parts of East Asia.
Eisenhower came to the presidency with some knowledge of East Asia and the western Pacific, having served as an aid to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines in the mid-1930s. And Eisenhower understood what it took to build an army. Equally important, writes Setzekorn, Eisenhower shifted “American national-security interests away from Europe to focus on Asia.” Ike appointed Adm. Arthur Radford, former commander of the Pacific Fleet, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Unlike Truman, he organized the National Security Council (NSC) to coordinate policy, bifurcating the NSC into planning and operations. He created what Setzekorn calls a “whole of government” approach to East Asian affairs, especially in terms of military assistance to key allies. The goal of Ike’s East Asia policy was to develop “the political, economic and military strength of non-Communist Asian countries,” and it didn’t matter to Eisenhower whether those countries were democracies or autocracies. Funding for our Asian allies rose considerably, while cuts were made to our allies in Europe.
Significantly, a portion of the funding for East Asian allies funded military academies to train officers. Setzekorn devotes a chapter each to the Eisenhower administration’s mostly successful efforts to strengthen and professionalize the armed forces of South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, and Japan. And in all of these countries, except Japan, there was only what Setzekorn calls a “light footprint” of American boots on the ground. We supplied the equipment and training, but the regional allies supplied the troops on the ground. And in Eisenhower’s time, this local deterrent force was reinforced by our extended nuclear deterrent, which proved itself during the two Taiwan Strait crises in the 1950s. Regrettably, Setzekorn writes, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations “lost the strategic initiative and became bogged down in a proxy war on the Chinese periphery.”
Eisenhower’s East Asia policy kept the peace at an acceptable cost and successfully deterred China’s rulers in Beijing. The Eisenhower Doctrine in East Asia followed a “strategy of developing allied military capability in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, South Vietnam, and South Korea,” and this effectively “created a defensive network to deter PRC aggression and protect American interests without endangering American lives.” Setzekorn believes that a similar policy approach today is our best chance of once again successfully deterring an equally ambitious but much better armed PRC.
