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Past Event
Seminar

Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783

Open to the Public

Speaker: Michael Green, Associate Professor of International Relations and Chair in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University; Senior Vice President for Asia and Japan Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Moderator: Susan Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics and Director, WCFIA Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Harvard University.

In this seminar, Professor Michael Green will present materials from his forthcoming book, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific since 1783 (Columbia University Press, 2017). Soon after the American Revolution, 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?

Co-Sponsored by the International Security Program and the Harvard University Asia Center.

Date: Time: - Location: South Building, Belfer Case Study Room S020
By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783

Full Description

Speaker: Michael Green, Associate Professor of International Relations and Chair in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University; Senior Vice President for Asia and Japan Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Moderator: Susan Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics and Director, WCFIA Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Harvard University.

In this seminar, Professor Michael Green will present materials from his forthcoming book, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific since 1783 (Columbia University Press, 2017). Soon after the American Revolution, 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?

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.

Co-Sponsored by the International Security Program and the Harvard University Asia Center

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