A01=Joyce Mao
american sovereignty
asia first
Author_Joyce Mao
Category=JPS
Category=NHK
chiang kai-shek
china
christianity
cold war
communism
conservatism
coup
defense state
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
exile
foreign policy
government
history
international relations
isolationism
john birch society
korea
military intervention
nonfiction
political science
politics
red scare
regime change
revolution
taiwan
technology
world leaders
Product details
- ISBN 9780226252711
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jun 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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After Japanese bombs hit Pearl Harbor, the American right stood at a cross-roads. Generally isolationist, conservatives needed to forge their own foreign policy agenda if they wanted to remain politically viable. When Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China in 1949 - with the Cold War just underway - they now had a new object of foreign policy, and as Joyce Mao reveals in this fascinating new look at twentieth-century Pacific affairs, that change would provide vital ingredients for American conservatism as we know it today. Mao explores the deep resonance American conservatives felt with the defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek and his exile to Taiwan, which they lamented as the loss of China to communism and the corrosion of traditional values. In response, they fomented aggressive anti-communist positions that urged greater action in the Pacific, a policy known as "Asia First." While this policy would do nothing to oust the communists from China, it was powerfully effective at home.
Asia First provided American conservatives a set of ideals-American sovereignty, selective military intervention, strident anti-communism, and the promotion of a technological defense state-that would bring them into the global era with the positions that are now their hallmark.
Joyce Mao is assistant professor of US history at Middlebury College in Vermont.
