Regional integration: Japan and South Korea in America's Asian policy

Abstract

Ever since the late 1940s, U.S. Asian policy sought to use the southern half of the Korean peninsula and Japan to create a configuration of military and economic power which would enable the United States to contain the might of both China and the Soviet Union, while simultaneously insuring its own hegemony over Pacific-Asia. This basic strategy, which may be termed the regional integration of U.S. imperialism, turned on making industrialized Japan dependent on the U.S., and economically backward South Korea dependent, ultimately, on Japan. Its psychological roots lay in a traditional, shared Japanese-American ruling class attitude of contempt for the Koreans and the other formerly colonized peoples of Asia. If Theodore Roosevelt exemplified such an outlook early in this century, John Foster Dulles was its exemplar by the middle of the century. Dulles's first memorandum on Japan, dated June 6, 1950, and summarized by Frederick Dunn, stated that “… it might be possible to capitalize on the Japanese feeling of racial and social superiority to the Chinese, Koreans and Russians, and to convince them that as part of the free world they would be in equal fellowship with a group which is superior to the members of the Communist world.”