Gidget Goes Hawaiian.
The advent of commercial jet travel in the late 195os brought an enormous new force field of humanity down upon the islands: tourists. Waikiki Beach, now almost invisible amid a forest of high-rise buildings, had but three hotels before Pearl Harbor-even if one of them, the Royal Hawaiian, was a pink stucco paean to art deco splendor (its persimmon and obsidian marble lobby is still a wonder to behold). Opened in 1927, it offered high-speed elevators, badminton and croquet, its own white-sand beach, and native boys who climbed coconut trees and other things for tips. Before the war a grand total of some 5oo air travelers arrived annually on Pan Am Clippers, most of them rich; Hollywood stars like Bob Hope and Mary Pickford joined the Rockefellers in well-publicized (by the sugar barons) celebrity cruises to Honolulu. Then commercial jet travel opened the floodgates: in the 195os tourist spending grew by 350 percent, by 196o half a million tourists had arrived by commercial airliner, and that was a mere down payment on a trade that ballooned beyond anyone"s imagination-5 million tourists by 1985, 7 million by 2000, of which nearly 2 million came from j.a.pan (and what tourists they were; the j.a.panese spent an average of $586 a day, compared to $119 a day from mainlanders). Right in the middle of this postwar explosion was World War II magnate Henry J. Kaiser, who saw the tourist hordes coming from many miles away and built the Hawaiian Village Hotel on top of slums and a swamp. Soon he also had a cement plant, a hospital, a TV station, and the ticket for what to do with obsolescent sugar plantations: turn them into real estate subdivisions and resorts (like the 14,000-home Koko Head resort city). Good New Deal industrialist that he was, Kaiser also brought low-cost comprehensive health care to Hawaii. Castle and Cooke, however, still looked only at the bottom line-and went into macadamia nuts and tuna fish. Meanwhile the Royal Hawaiian still had a starring role: in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (i96i), Sandra Dee stays there with her parents, surfs, does the hula, and contemplates losing her virginity (that is, her character"s virginity) under the paradisal "spell" of lovely Waikiki.32 Ultimately so much wealth has been produced in or showered on these islands-the military, tourists, successive real estate booms-that the postwar Democratic establishment could join the elite, prosper for themselves, and still confer generous welfare benefits on the people. Democratic hegemony coinciding with a long, even perennial, economic boom: this may be as good as it gets in America. This accommodation, so well a.n.a.lyzed by George Cooper and Gavan Daws,33 meant many things: an osmotic disinclination to attack concentrated wealth or break up the venerable landholdings of the old caciques, the flip side of everybody making money in all manner of "development," and the resultant perduring of the Big Five down to the present, if in altered form; an astonishingly interlocked elite, if now encompa.s.sing missionary offspring, the upwardly mobile j.a.panese-Americans, and multiethnic hoi polloi; a bipartisan welcome mat rolled out to all things military and all things j.a.panese; booms one after another-tourist booms, defense booms, resort and condo booms, high-tech booms-all concentrated around the hottest real estate market in America; eternally rising living standards and home sale windfalls; endless hogwash about the manifold importance of the Pacific Rim and Hawaii"s place in it; and one of the truly multiracial, multicultural societies in the nation-with many natives now wanting to take back their islands, and their sovereignty.34 The venerable Punahou School is known now not for its doting succor to the planters" offspring, but for its most ill.u.s.trious graduate: the multiethnic-in-one-person politician known as Barack Obama (who "eastered" from Hawaii to Occidental College to Harvard, thence to the White House). Somehow it seems appropriate that the austere, astringent Calvinist interlopers from Maine, driven nearly insane by the joie de vivre of the Hawaiians, should find themselves dissolving away in a wealthy sea of polyglot humanity.
A Cold Cold-War Bastion.
Alaska"s proximity to j.a.pan and the Soviet Union gave it an overriding importance in World War II and the cold war, and so defense billions came pouring in there, too. In the late 1940s the Pentagon built Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, designed for long-range bombers; when it opened it was the largest air field in the world. World War II bases like Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base got refurbished and improved, and other bases emerged on the islands of St. Lawrence, Kodiak, Shemya, and Adak. St. Lawrence, where soldiers monitored Soviet radio transmissions a scant fifty miles away from Siberia, might be the worst posting in the world with freezing temperatures ten months of the year, no daylight in the dead of winter, and arctic winds howling outside the fifteen Quonset huts making up this listening post, sending temperatures to minus 6o degrees. Governor Ernest Gruening, later a strong opponent of the Vietnam War as a senator, campaigned for a comprehensive radar network in Alaska to give early warning of Soviet attack-later known as the Distant Early Warning or DEW line. Three thousand miles long, it was built over four years by American and Canadian construction crews totaling 23,000. Punctuated by fifty radar stations each with ma.s.sive gold domes, the DEW line was operational by 1957 and connected up to the North American Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs. It was supposed to monitor Soviet Tu-16 Badger longrange bombers introduced in 1955, with 4,250-mile range. Soon, however, it scanned the heavens for intercontinental ballistic missiles arcing toward the continental United States, their supersonic speed leaving a scant twenty minutes of warning time.35 Postwar Alaska, like the Pentagon, lives comfortably amid acronyms-but really just two: ANCSA and ANILCA. The first is the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, and the second is the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of i98o, which would appear to have two unnecessary words-but they refer to ANILCA"s place in American environmental history. The act denied 28 percent of Alaskan land to "development," and when added to the existing 12 percent already removed, close to half (42 percent) of the entire state was environmentally protected. ANILCA also set aside 104 million acres for conservation (and put 50 million acres of that into the wilderness category), thereby doubling the nation"s total exempt land (thus the two odd words: "national interest"), while allowing Indians access to fish, game, and other resources on the same land (called "subsistence provisions"). Sixty percent of Alaskan land, an area twice the size of California, is thus reserved by the federal government; ANILCA is probably the best legislative victory for the environment in U.S. history.
Development interests supported by the majority of the settler population launched a protracted struggle against ANILCA, delaying implementation through the state legislature of its subsistence provisions until Washington mounted a takeover of fish and game management in 1998-99. This would be surprising if we imagine the average Alaskan off in the wilderness shooting grizzlies, but most whites live in urban settings, like their counterparts in the lower forty-eight; Anchorage, in particular, which began as a collectivity of tents in 1914, is every bit as undistinguished a city as Reno or Tampa. Meanwhile most Indians (16 percent of Alaska"s population) actually live out the myths of the frontier-fishing, hunting, living off the land.36 These rugged individuals include Eskimos and Aleuts, two non-Indian aboriginal groups, and Pacific Northwest Coast and Athabaskan Indians, about ioo,ooo strong all tolled. They were the beneficiaries of ANCSA, "perhaps the most generous settlement ever between the federal government and American Natives," in the words of Stephen Hayc.o.x. They got fee simple t.i.tle to 40 million acres of land in and around their villages; in recompense for relinquishing t.i.tle claims to Alaska"s remaining 330 million acres, the tribes received nearly Si billion, which was used to capitalize twelve regional development centers and to support village corporations, most of which have proved successful over the years. Perhaps most important, over succeeding decades contempt for Alaska"s native peoples, which had been ubiquitous, "disappeared from the press and from common discourse"-it was "a civil rights triumph." The oil companies also benefited from ANCSA because natives would never have agreed to pipelines if their claims had not been settled.37 Alaskans appear to be interested in Alaska but not much in the lower forty-eight: John McPhee called it "a foreign country significantly populated with Americans." They take the pre-Microsoft provincialism of Seattle and the measured pace of Oregon and quadruple both, into a world of our wilderness, our salmon, our bears, our mountains, our strawberries (Susitnas, Talkeetnas, and Matareds are just three of their strawberry varieties). Alaskan pride is stirred by cabbages the size of medicine b.a.l.l.s, zucchinis like Trident submarines, elongated rhubarbs and bulbous cauliflower-it all grows there, not to mention eight-foot high-clover. The state motto might be, "never put restrictions on an individual," and let"s not even mention that awful federal government, which used to own 99 percent of this state and now-a mere 6o percent. Alaskans love their winter silence, like softly falling snow in a vast natural chamber with no resonance; their aloneness is more complete than the "We Three" of the memorable Ink Spots song: they have themselves and their shadow-but no echo. Imagine there were only twenty-five people in New Jersey, McPhee wrote, as he tried to fathom a wilderness experience like no other (in Alaska, one person per square mile; in New Jersey, more than a thousand per square mile, ranking first among the states). A very slow pace comes to a glacial halt as the freezes descend. Families hunt through September and then subsist through the dark winter months on moose meatloaf, ground moose with Spanish rice, "spaghetti with mooseburger," and "Swiss moosesteak." Sometimes the monotony is broken with fresh shoulders of grizzly-a burgundy-colored cut, "more flavorful than any wild meat," including muskrat, weasel and ... moose.38 Black Gold Again.
Statehood deliberations coincided with the first oil discoveries in 1957 on the Kenai National Moose Range, managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The service had approved some exploration licenses two years earlier, and when big wells turned up Alaskans decided they didn"t like moose that much after all. A decade later Atlantic Richfield found a deposit forty-five miles long and eighteen miles wide at Prudhoe Bay, a vast pool promising 15 billion barrels of oil and billions more cubic feet of natural gas-the biggest field ever found in the United States, which happened to sit between two federal land withdrawals: the largest wildlife area in the country and a strategic petroleum reserve. The battle was joined instantly between the oil developers (supported by most settlers) and the environmentalists. We know who won, of course. Alaska did not simply have an oil boom: after oil got funneled through the notorious permafrost pipeline, it remade the state. Oil provided more than 40 percent of the state"s income, another 35 percent came from the federal government, and both towered over other private sector activities. Oil created more than 33,000 jobs (fully 28,000 workers were needed to build the pipeline, which ultimately cost nearly $8 billion). State tax coffers swelled by $5o billion from the 1970s to 2000 as oil accounted for 85 percent of revenue and literally spilled over, in that Alaskan residents got new high schools wherever there were at least fifteen students and annual dividend checks for everybody -$8oo in 1982, rising to over $i,ooo per resident in recent years. The pipeline has never had a serious leak, vindicating the developers.39 No, Alaska didn"t suffer leaks-just an 11-million-gallon cataract.
In 1899 E. H. Harriman"s entourage cruised around Prince William Sound, as we have seen, flabbergasted by its natural beauty, its fjords (one of them got named Harriman Fjord), its soaring bald eagles, elephant seals and killer whales, its glaciers (four of which they named Smith, Bryn Mawr, Va.s.sar, and Wellesley in hopes of planting a frosty New England here, too). In 1989 another ship entered the same sound, piloted by a drunken captain; it was three football fields long and filled with the equivalent of 1.26 million barrels of oil. It left its filling station at Valdez on the evening of March 27, skirted around some icebergs, and then "fetched up" on a reef just past midnight-it was now Good Friday. After Bligh Reef breached its holding tanks the Exxon Valdez kept going another 6oo feet, disgorging nearly ii million gallons of petroleum into the pristine sound. Then a spring storm lashed the area, making the deployment of containment booms impossible. The biggest oil spill in American history slicked 1,300 miles of sh.o.r.eline and zoo miles of beaches and killed in the neighborhood of 22 killer whales, 250 bald eagles, 300 seals, 2,800 otters, and 250,000 seabirds of all varieties. Eventually the federal and state governments fined Exxon $i5o million, later reduced to $25 million-not to let Exxon off the hook but in recognition of the $2.1 billion it paid out to clean up its own mess (a quarter of what it cost to build the TransAlaska Pipeline).40 A Containment Policy.
They glide by on trucks and railcars with names like Hanjin pasted on their sides, they sit piled up on docks: what are they? Containers seemed to sneak up on us, starting up slowly and unnoticed in April 19S6 when a reconfigured World War II tanker ferried fifty-eight aluminum truck bodies (wheels removed) from Newark to Houston. A North Carolinian named Malcolm P. McLean was sick and tired of Northeast Corridor transportation bottlenecks and dreamed of driving his company"s trucks right onto surplus cargo ships and sending them up and down the coast. It turned out to be smarter to leave the undercarriage and take the truck box; then you could stack them one on top of another. When his business began, people paid $5.83 per ton to load cargo by the usual methods; it was less than 16 cents per ton when they did it McLean"s way.41 The sea-to-sea continent paid immeasurable dividends as ocean shippers stuffed cargo into the boxes, stacked them up, and offloaded them to waiting trains and i8-wheelers with almost no human labor. Another American invention, containers: a little-noticed but crucial contributor to the time-and-s.p.a.ce of world commerce, this simple technology did more to circ.u.mambulate the globe than the steamship or the railways. Remember the difference between St. Louis stevedores loading individual bags of grain onto Mississippi barges and Chicago"s grain elevators: now the elevated cranes are everywhere, but they deploy nondescript boxes. Containers are like Chicago"s pigs or Swift"s refrigerated cars, except they don"t carry a river of corn or oranges: they carry everything.
What was good for Mr. McLean on the East Coast was far better for a planet covered two-thirds by water: it revived the oldest American transportation method, the riparian, at unheard of distances and economies of scale. A fully loaded, seemingly endless coal train is an awesome artifact of every midwesterner"s childhood and ferries the heaviest weights across terra firma (some 23,000 tons); a big container ship carries three or four times that weight. A ship with 3,000 containers can be sent around the world with a crew of twenty, and it takes a mere ninety seconds for a giant crane to unload each box. A container leaving Malaysia arrives in Seattle in nine days, hops on a train to Chicago the next day, gets offloaded to a truck and arrives in Cincinnati twenty-two days after it left Penang. The gains from containers were revolutionary: if Mr. McLean drove his costs down by a factor of 37, shipping costs almost evaporated. In 1961 shipping const.i.tuted 12 percent of the value of all U.S. exports and remained relatively high through the late 1970s; although estimating these costs is very tricky, they are probably less than 5 percent today.42 With container shipping Pacific Coast ports were perfectly poised as entrepots for the takeoff of the American West Coast and the East Asian economies, displacing the old centers and the old methods, like New York and San Francisco where tens of thousands of dockworkers cl.u.s.tered in the early postwar period-gantry cranes digging heavy pallets out of the hold, longsh.o.r.emen unpacking the cargo, unions making the rules, the Mafia exacting surcharges, people darting here and there pilfering goods, Marlon Brando failing to become a contender. Container shipping turned the port of Seattle into James J. Hill"s dream (a century late), making a rapid land bridge of the continent for shipments going back and forth between Asia, the United States, and Europe; depending on the year, either Seattle or San Jose leads all exporting cities in the country. Seattle was always closer (by a day"s shipping) to j.a.pan, Korea, and north China than any other Pacific port, but the container land bridge drastically reduced shipping costs with high-tech apparatuses that cl.u.s.ter like whooping cranes along the sh.o.r.e; lifting a container off a ship and depositing it on a train is almost automatic. In 1972 Portland and Seattle had about the same value of exports ($348 million for Seattle, $388 million for Portland), but by 1986 Seattle had $4.2 billion, Portland about $2 billion, and thereafter Seattle"s trade just dwarfed its Oregon neighbor.43 Today Southern California is clearly the epicenter of the American container trade because it handles the exports of the workshop of the world: China, which fills more than a quarter of all existing containers. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine China"s leap into the forefront of export-led development in the past thirty years without container shipping; Hong Kong and nearby Shenzhen handled 23 million twenty-foot containers in Zoos, compared to io million in Los Angeles/Long Beach and a paltry 3.3 million in New York/Newark. Among world container ports, Los Angeles and San Pedro together ranked third in Zoos, and Southern California ranked first when Long Beach was added. Oakland (another ma.s.sive container entrepot) completely displaced San Francisco, just as McLean"s Sea-Land company in Newark devastated New York ports (the New York metropolitan area ranked fourteenth, but that was mostly Newark). By 2003 Los Angeles ranked eighth in the world by itself, Long Beach thirteenth, and Seattle was twenty-eighth (more telling, of the twenty largest container ports in the world, thirteen were on the Pacific Rim).44 I fear the reader may antic.i.p.ate the next sentence, but even here the Pentagon was important. If the provenance of this invention was entirely in the open market, Sea-Land solved an enormous logistical problem for American forces as the rapid Vietnam buildup got going in 1965, by turning Cam Ranh Bay into a busy containerport. Since the ships had little to bring back, the same containers headed north to pick up exports in j.a.pan, which touched off the ubiquitous container trade soon visible in any East Asian port. The business is now so refined that floating mega-platforms with 5,ooo-and soon 10,ooo-containers ply the Pacific, riding low in the water and taking their time, because the ships generate tremendous momentum and so "fuel consumption does not increase in proportion to tonnage," in Witold Rybczyn- ski"s words, yielding economies of scale like the riverine barges of the eighteenth century but with a planet to roam, thereby slashing even the miniscule costs of container transport a decade ago by 4o and 5o percent.41 Your Nike sneaker, or anything else with parts hailing from ten or twelve countries, is inexplicable apart from the commodity chain made possible by dirt cheap shipping in containers. Cargo: finally this odd word has fulfilled its telos.
The Pacific Bridal Couch.
The first Asian-Americans walked here over the Aleutian Island land bridge thousands of years ago. Today they have returned to populate all walks of life in this country, even if many whites remain clueless. Congressman Norman Mineta, a Nisei with ten terms in the House under his belt, got complemented on his good English by a General Motors executive, who then asked, "How long have you been in this country?" Senator Sam Brownback enjoyed faking a Chinese accent while lambasting Asian-American fundraising for President Clinton: "no raise money, no get bonus." Self-consciously Irish journalist Jimmy Breslin, outraged about reporter Ji-Yeon Yuh writing in Newsday that one of his columns was "s.e.xist," bellowed out to the whole newsroom that "The f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h doesn"t know her place. She"s a little dog, a little cur ... a yellow cur. Let"s make it racial." And just to show how off base Yuh"s allegation was, for good measure he called her "a slant-eyed c.u.n.t."46 Dr. Yuh"s place is now in the Northwestern University History Department; she"s a friend of mine, as is her brother. He told me about playing high school basketball in Georgia and hearing "c.h.i.n.k" and "j.a.p" and "slope" as he ran down the court (he"s Korean-American). When Asian-Americans finally achieve political clout commensurate with their wealth, education, and professional status in the country (they are nowhere near that position yet), this crude but usually visceral and unthinking abuse will move out of the public domain and into the quiet of private homes.
Science is still catching up to reality, too. In 1931 anatomy professor Robert Bennett Bean predictably determined that "the brain of the White Race is large," that of "the Yellow-Brown race" only "medium human in size"-but here"s the good news: that makes Asians "less subject to cares and worries." It seems laughable, but in the 199os psychologist J. Philippe Rushton sized up racial brains yet again, finding Professor Bean to be in error: "Oriental" brains are quite as large as white brains. But Rushton also a.s.sayed a second part of the anatomy to determine personality type and behavior. The more intelligent a person is, he discovered, the bigger the brain and the smaller his (and her?) genitalia and vice versa. "The racial gradient of Oriental-white-black occurs on multifariously complex dimensions," to be sure, but judging from "brain size, intelligence, and personality to law abidingness, social organization, and reproductive morphology, Africans and Asians average at opposite ends of the continuum, with Caucasian populations falling intermediately." Dr. Rushton"s scientific inquiry also found that Orientals tend to be pa.s.sive, but then people with larger brains tend to be that way, he explained.47 Like the subtle alterations in Faye Dunaway"s countenance as Chinatown progressed, America is looking more and more Asian-but still not thinking much about the likely consequences.
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new to the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
-PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER, January 17, 1961.
cademe unfortunately turns up few pract.i.tioners of the occult art of maintaining internal combustion engines. But one venerable figure used to hop on his motorcycle in Nyack, a lovely Hudson River town, and roar down to Columbia University with leather saddlebags flying in the wind. He often said sociology was easy, tuning up a Harley was difficult. Somewhat like President Eisenhower, C. Wright Mills took a look around in the 195os and discerned something entirely new in American life: a military-industrial complex. More than that, a "power elite" made most of the important decisions: a tripart.i.te group of corporate leaders, executive branch administrators, and military bra.s.s had a virtual monopoly on key choices, industrial production, and the use of force. They talked to each other, exchanged jobs, sat on the same corporate boards, played golf together, and occupied the top portion of a pyramid of power (which suspiciously resembled the Masonic symbol on the back of your dollar bill). Just beneath the top were "the middle levels of power," which corresponded to the democratic and pluralist theories about how the country works that people imbibed from first grade through their PhD programs. Below that was a "ma.s.s society" filling two-thirds of the pyramid and containing most Americans, who were mostly clueless about elite practices.
For Mills, the idea that public opinion guided public affairs was a mere fairy tale. He couldn"t figure out how this elite made its decisions-since there was so little evidence-but he knew all of them had prospered in the context of "an "emergency" without a foreseeable end," that being not World War II but the turning point of 1950 and NSC-68, inaugurating an unprecedented era in American life. When the emergency ended in 1991, along came another one, just as Mills would have predicted, and his tripart.i.te power elite is far more influential today than it was 5o years ago.1 Becoming Hegemonic.
The United States basked in its own hemisphere for 15o years, rolling around like an Atlantic and Pacific great whale in the free national security afforded by its continental breadth and isolation, the absence of any credible threat, and the shelter of oceans on which the friendly British navy was dominant. World War II began for Americans in the Pacific, and that remained the primary theater (if not the main priority) of American warfare until D-Day in June 1944. If the allies bore the brunt of the fighting against the n.a.z.is, especially the Russians, the United States was preeminent in the Pacific fighting and proceeded to organize a unilateral occupation of j.a.pan and a general reorganization of postwar East Asian international relations. But in the years immediately after the end of the war, American power was tentative and unformed; under different leadership, it might well have receded back to continental isolation. It was not until 1947 that internationalist elites in Washington established a clear line and direction for America"s position in the postwar world-to fulfill John Hay"s prescience in 1900 and inherit Britain"s hegemonic role at long last.
The baton of world leadership finally and definitively pa.s.sed from London to Washington on February 21, 1947, when a British Emba.s.sy official informed Dean Acheson that England could not give Greece and Turkey $25o million in military and economic aid; by implication, it could no longer defend the Mediterranean and the newly found chasms of Middle Eastern petroleum. A few days later Acheson walked off to lunch with a friend, remarking that "there are only two powers in the world now," the United States and the Soviet Union. Acheson did not mean that an era of bipolarity had dawned, although he meant that as well; he meant something much deeper-the subst.i.tution of American for British leadership. Acheson was present at this creation and did not mistake the opportunities and perils of America"s new position in the world.2 His problem was to be pregnant with an idea that he could not articulate, lest Harry Truman lose the next election (for example, by announcing that the United States had now become the power of last resort for the world). To put it differently, the internationalist forces in American politics lacked a strong domestic base, particularly in the Congress. George Kerman provided the solution to this dilemma with an elegant metaphor: containment. Imagine, for an America to march outward and inherit Britain"s role, and you mark it up for the defense. Imagine, a doctrine defining hegemony by what it opposes, obviating the necessity to explain to the American people what it is and what its consequences would be for them. But it worked: the decisions taken in the late 1940s shaped the world for the rest of the century.
Acheson knew almost nothing about military power. For him and other American statesmen, the defeat of j.a.pan and Germany and the struggle with communism were but one part, and the secondary part, of an American project to revive the world economy from the devastation of global depression and world war. Acheson was an internationalist in his bones, looking to Europe and especially Britain for support and guidance, just like Henry Cabot Lodge, and seeking multilateral solutions to postwar problems. At first the problem of restoring the world economy seemed to be solved with the Bretton Woods mechanisms elaborated in 1944 (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). When by 1947 they had not worked to revive the advanced industrial states, the Marshall Plan arrived in Europe and the "reverse course" in j.a.pan, removing controls on heavy industries in the defeated powers. When by 195o the allied economies were still not growing sufficiently, NSC-68, written mostly by Paul Nitze but guided by the thinking of Acheson (by then President Truman"s secretary of state), hit upon military Keynesianism as a device that did, finally, prime the pump of the advanced industrial economies (and especially j.a.pan). The Korean War was the crisis that built the American national security state and pushed through the money to pay for it, and with victory in the war to reestablish the South (containment) and defeat in the war to topple the North (regime change), this war transformed and stabilized Kennan"s doctrine. It also finally got the j.a.panese and West German economies growing strongly. From June to December 195o the defense budget quadrupled, from $13 to $56 billion (or from Si 5i to $650 billion in constant 2007 dollars) or 14 percent of GNP, a high point never again reached during the cold war or even the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.3 In the special partnership with Britain from 19oo to 1947, Americans learned how to pursue national interests through multilateral mechanisms and close relations with European allies, how to shape an intelligence func tion that was primarily civilian and academic, and ultimately how to take England"s role upon itself. The American internationalists like Stimson or Acheson sought a hegemony defined as first among equals, through manysided cooperation with Europe. They did not challenge European colonies but hoped to get an American foot in the door-through the "open door."4 They were Atlanticists. If they had towering influence after 1941, they were never very influential before that. Then the bipolar rivalry with Moscow welded the United States to Western Europe in a way that might not have happened without the Soviet threat. After the cold war ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, the influence of the internationalists waned marginally in the 199os-and then in the new century, dramatically. As the cold war recedes into history, so the American commitment to internationalism may as well. The westward-moving tradition of expansionism, unilateralism, the back turned to Europe, a belief in the efficacy of military force to forge political solutions, and violent confrontation with alien peoples came to life again in the new century. Atlanticist internationalism may be recuperated by new leaders coming to power in 2oo9, of course, but the iron necessity that forged it from 1941 to 1991 no longer exists. Meanwhile the military"s heritage from World War II and Korea persists as if nothing had happened, as if Mills"s "crisis" remained a vital threat to the nation.
Most postwar internationalists had little experience with or interest in the use of military force, an attribute they shared with John Hay and Henry Cabot Lodge. The seizure of Hawaii and the Philippines, the proclamation of the Open Door, and the intervention in the Boxer Rebellion marked a new outward advance, a thrust fully embodied in Teddy Roosevelt-it was empire, and it all happened in the Pacific. William Appleman Williams, following Charles Beard, memorably argued that this empire grew out of an agreement on expansion proposed by the agrarian South and West (cotton and wheat) and accepted by the industrial East." The argument of this book has been different: empire grew out of the western thrust across the continent by expansionists who disdained Europe, its power politics, and its colonies, desiring instead maximum, unhindered American freedom in the world. Wall Street and the industrial East opposed the war with Spain, and if they weren"t averse to taking the Philippines or sending troops time and time again to protect business interests in Central America, their preferred international model remained England, and particularly its hegemonic role as power of last resort in the long peace between 1815 and 1914. They were internationalist, multilateralist Atlanticists, and their heyday lasted sixty years, from 1941 to 2oo1. Since 1950, however, the American realm in the world has been guaranteed by military forces who relate much more easily to the expansionist tendency. Empires need territory, and these folks live and work on an archipelago that is the clearest expression of the American empire.*
The Archipelago.
In the second half of the twentieth century an entirely new phenomenon emerged in American history, namely, the permanent stationing of soldiers in a myriad of foreign bases across the face of the planet, connected to an enormous domestic complex of defense industries. For the first time in modern history the leading power maintained an extensive network of bases on the territory of its allies and economic compet.i.tors j.a.pan, Germany, Britain, Italy, South Korea, all the industrial powers save France and Russia-marking a radical break with the European balance of power and the operation of realpolitik and a radical departure in American history: an archipelago of empire.6 The military structure of the British Empire was a globe-girdling chain of strategic naval bases, like the one at Singapore; no one in his right mind imagined British army bases perched on the soil of competing industrial nations.7 The maritime dominance of the American archipelago is far greater than the United Kingdom"s ever was, yet it also has vastly superior global air and land forces-and has bases almost everywhere.
This is an American realm with no name, a territorial presence with little if any standing in the literature of international affairs. The preferred strategy since Hay"s Open Door was nonterritorial, whether in gaining access to imperial concessions in China a century ago, or in the postwar hegemony connoting a first-among-equals multilateralism: American preponderance but not dominance, a usage of hegemony consistent with its original Greek meaning in Thucydides or the ancient Roman imperium that also connoted nonterritorial power." But hegemony and imperium sound equally inappropriate to most Americans: they sound like we run a colonial empire, as if we were England or j.a.pan seventy years ago. We don"t. But we do run a territorial empire-the archipelago of somewhere between 737 and 86o overseas military installations around the world, with American military personnel operating in 153 countries, which most Americans know little if anything about-a kind of stealth empire, "hidden in plain sight" as Kathy Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull put it,9 one part of which can occasionally be closed down (like U.S. bases in the Philippines in 1992) but which persists because it is politically and culturally invisible, at least to Americans.
The postwar order took shape through positive policy and through the establishment of distinct outer limits, the transgression of which was rare or even inconceivable, provoking immediate crisis-the orientation of West Berlin toward the Soviet bloc, for example. That"s what the bases were put there for, to defend our allies but also to limit their choices-a light hold on the jugular, which might sound too strong until Americans ask themselves, what would we think of myriad foreign bases on our soil? The typical experience of this hegemony, however, was a mundane, benign, and mostly unremarked daily life of subtle constraint, in which the United States kept allied nations on defense, resource, and, for many years, financial dependencies. This penetration was clearest in the frontline cold war semi-sovereign states like j.a.pan, West Germany, and South Korea, and it was conceived by people like Kerman as an indirect, outer-limit control on the worst outcome, namely, orientation to the other side-what John McMurtry calls "determination by constraint": it simultaneously constrains and leaves a significant degree of autonomy.10 The aggressors in World War II, j.a.pan and Germany, were tied down by American bases, and they remain so: in the seventh decade after the war we still don"t know what either nation would look like if it were truly independent. We aren"t going to find out anytime soon, either.
In an important interpretation Robert Latham calls this structure the American "external state" and views it as a central element of liberal worldorder building. The "free world" connoted a realm of liberal democracies and authoritarian client states. It was Acheson"s liberal order, and it also led to a vast global militarization (by the i96os encompa.s.sing 1.5 million American troops stationed in hundreds of bases in thirty-five countries, with formal security commitments to forty-three countries, the training and equipping of military forces in seventy countries), a phenomenon often treated as an unfortunate result of the bipolar confrontation with Moscow." In another sense our troops in j.a.pan and Germany are also their external state because without the bases they would have to rearm dramatically.
This permanent transnational military structure has not gone from victory to victory. Since 195o the United States has fought four major warsKorea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq-and has only won one of them (at this writing). But outcomes have little impact on the archipelago"s permanency. Win, lose, or draw, the wars end but the military no longer deflates and the troops no longer come home (with the exception of Vietnam: and had we been able to stabilize South Vietnam, they would still be there). The United States won a decisive victory in 1945, but the troops did not come home then, either: some ioo,ooo troops remain in j.a.pan and Germany, just as the stalemate in Korea left 30,000 to 40,000 there.
The Korean War was the occasion for building a permanent standing military and a national security state where none had existed before, as containing communism became an open-ended, global proposition. A mere decade later President Eisenhower could say that "we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions," employing 3.5 million people in the defense establishment and spending more than "the net income of all United States corporations." That was from his farewell address; less remembered is Ike"s final news conference where he sounded just like Mills by remarking that the armaments industry was so pervasive that it affected "almost an insidious penetration of our own minds," making Americans think that the only thing the country does is produce weapons and missiles.12 When Western communism collapsed it appeared for a few years that a serious reduction in the permanent military might occur, but "rogue states" kept it going and then the "war on terror" provided another amorphous, open-ended global commitment.
This archipelago is the clearest territorial (and therefore imperial) element in the American position in the world, and it has its domestic counterpart in a host of home military bases and industries that serve defense needs, and in a highly lucrative revolving door where generals retire to become defense industry executives and industry executives take furloughs to run Washington agencies. (In 2001, for example, George W. Bush appointed Peter t.e.e.t.s, chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin, to run the National Reconnaissance Office-by far the best-funded intelligence agency; meanwhile the former NRO director, Jeff Harris, took a job with Lockheed s.p.a.ce Systems.)13 Yet this archipelago is one of the most unstudied phenomena in American life. Although millions of Americans have inhabited these bases, their global landscape is so commonly unknown that its full dimensions almost always come as a surprise to the uninitiated (or to the initiates themselves: according to two eyewitnesses, when he arrived at the Pentagon in zoos Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was surprised to learn that Korea still held 40,000 American troops).
There is a military-industrial complex, and certain firms are closely identified with this archipelago because they helped to build it: Bechtel for example. But it is difficult for outsiders to a.s.sess how things work, as Mills suggested, and easy to overestimate their influence. When the Bechtel Group sent Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz to serve in the Reagan administration, it was hard not to see a California conspiracy in the works: presumably power was now shifting radically west. In fact, Bechtel happily slurped at the federal trough for decades on a thoroughly bipartisan basis; John McCone, after all, was Kennedy"s CIA chief, and Bechtel"s candidate in 1980 was not Reagan but Texas DemocratJohn Connally. Furthermore, George Shultz had no respect for Weinberger going back to the Nixon administration when Shultz ran the Office of Management and Budget and Weinberger was his deputy; Shultz routinely bypa.s.sed Weinberger to get advice from Arnold R. Weber, a former colleague from the University of Chicago. Shultz was a savvy and unpretentious Henry Kissinger for one Republican administration or corporation after another, leaving Washington in May 1974 to run Bechtel as Nixon"s imminent impeachment loomed, then coming back when Reagan asked him to be secretary of state.14 Long before George Shultz shifted from Washington to Bechtel and back, John McCone was an individual paradigm of the nexus between national security and industry-linking high position in Washington with Bechtel, defense firms, major oil companies, and vast construction projects in the Persian Gulf. He was one of the first westerners to join the establishment, and he was a charter member of the military-industrial complex with extraordinary staying power. After getting an engineering degree from Berkeley, he moved up to executive authority at Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles, which provided steel fittings for the Boulder Dam. In 1937 he formed B-M-P in Los Angeles, specializing in the design and construction of petroleum refineries and power plants for installation throughout the United States, South America, and the Persian Gulf. After the war began his company built and managed the air force"s modification center in Birmingham where B-24 and B-29 bombers were fitted out for combat, and through an affiliate called Pacific Tankers, he operated an extensive fleet of oil tankers for the U. S. Navy. By the 195os a very wealthy man, he was the second largest shareholder in Standard Oil of California. During the cold war he held one sensitive post after another. He was a special a.s.sistant to then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in 1948, undersecretary of the air force in 1950, head of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and subsequently director of the CIA under both Eisenhower and Kennedy. Just at the time McCone became director of the AEC (a position that led Dwight Eisenhower to include him in the National Security Council), his friend Kenneth Davis left his position as director of reactor development at the AEC to go to work for Bechtel.15 Bechtel, Shultz, Weinberger, and McCone are about a structure of state and corporate interests and a conservative Republican style of politics and business, a rightward-leaning ostensibly laissez-faire industrialism that hews closely to the state: but that has been true since the Six Companies built the Hoover Dam. And then there are all the Democrats who are part of the same elite, with liberal inflections.
A Waxing and Waning Military.
Until 1950 Americans never supported a large standing army, and the military was a negligible factor in American history and culture, apart from its performance in wars. The Const.i.tution itself "was constructed in fear of a powerful military establishment," the const.i.tuent states had their own independent militias, and only the navy seemed consonant with American conceptions of the uses of national military force. Americans loved victorious generals like Washington, Jackson, Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower enough to make them presidents. But after the victory, the military blended back into the woodwork of American life. The army reached 5o,ooo during the war with Mexico, then dropped to about io,ooo soldiers, 9o percent of them arrayed against Indians in the trans-Mississippi West at seventy-nine posts and trailside forts. The military ballooned into millions of citizen-soldiers during the Civil War and the two world wars, but always the army withered within months and years of victory-to a 25,ooo-soldier constabulary in the late nineteenth century (at a time when France had half a million soldiers, Germany had 419,000, and continental-nation Russia had 766,000), a neglected force of 135,ooo between the world wars, and a rapid (if temporary) shrinkage immediately after 1945. Likewise the navy declined quickly after the Civil War in spite of American prowess in ship technology, with the Asiatic Squadron retaining only five or six dilapidated gunboats. A permanent gain followed each war, but until 1941 the American military remained modest in size compared to other great powers, not well funded, not very influential, and indeed not really a respected profession. Military spending was less than i percent of GNP throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.16 The nineteenth-century American military was hardly a negligible fighting force. It was small but effective, flexible, worthy to its main task-fighting Indians-and capable of almost immediate expansion because so many citizens were virtual automatic patriots and also adept with weapons. This was a democratic army drawn from a male population the vast majority of whom owned a rifle, a core strength that enabled it to inflate and deflate rapidly. It was posted around the country and along the frontiers in small forts, but its extraordinary decentralization was also an a.s.set in fighting skirmishes and even guerrilla wars with Indians.17 Of course, the nineteenth-century army was configured to fight overmatched Indians and to defend a continent that no one was likely to attack; two oceans provided their own security. By the time Indians were pacified, most Americans couldn"t figure out a further use for it: around the old army general of the i89os "in his neatly disheveled blue uniform," C. Wright Mills wrote, "there hang wisps of gun smoke from the Civil War." A few officers sought to fashion a military that could be used to extend American power abroad-always to the west or across the Pacific, with afterthoughts about Central America but never Europe. Until the 1940s none succeeded. Captain Arthur MacArthur (Douglas MacArthur"s father) auth.o.r.ed his "Chinese Memorandum" in 1883, arguing that "a commanding and progressive nation" would only materialize when "we secure and maintain the soverignty [sic] of the Pacific," but his memo was unread by anyone except his underlings until discovered in the archives a hundred years later. For Army Chief of Staff Hugh L. Scott, the army was "little more than a national constabulary" before the war with Spain.18 McKinley-Roosevelt Secretary of War Elihu Root reorganized the army, raising its strength to ioo,ooo, and in 1912, as we have seen, the War Department created a colonial army for the Philippines, Hawaii, and the Ca.n.a.l Zone, which, although often understaffed, lasted until World War II and created a "cadre of semipermanent colonials" (in Linn"s words) with much Pacific experience. They volunteered for two years in the Philippines or three in Hawaii and often repeated their tours of duty. In 1903 Douglas MacArthur graduated from West Point-having finished first in his cla.s.s for three of his four years and achieving a merit rating topped only by Robert E. Lee. Soon he arrived in the Philippines with the Third Engineer Battalion and after two years became aide-de-camp to his father, Arthur. Douglas had an epiphany on a 1905 tour of military installations in Asia: here in the Orient was "western civilization"s last earth frontier"; he convinced himself that American destiny and indeed "the future" were "irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts."19 But MacArthur quickly settled into the unhurried, idyllic life of the Pacific Army. Then came Pearl Harbor and instantaneous national mobilization to over 8 million in uniform, but again Truman shrank the military: the army had 554,000 soldiers by 1948; the navy"s budget of $5o billion in 1945 slipped to $6 billion, and the air force watched most of its contracts get cancelled (aircraft industry sales dropped from $16 billion in 1944 to $1.2 billion in 1947). Defense spending fell to $13 billion a year, or about $15o billion in current dollars.20 The American military was still not a significant factor in national life before NSC-68 announced the answer to how much "preparedness" the country needed, thus closing a long American debate: and in mainstream Washington, it has never returned. Isolationists, of course, got blamed for the lack of military preparation in 1941, but the debate about America"s role in the world and what kind of military it should have is as old as the country itself: was it a republic or an empire? During the Korean War the United States was spending $65o billion on defense in current dollars, and it reached that maximum point again in the early part of this new century-a sum greater than the combined defense budgets of the next eighteen ranking military powers in 2009.
A Pacificist Orientation to the World.
Ever since General Douglas MacArthur issued General Order Number One on 15 August, 1945, excluding Allied powers from the occupation of j.a.pan (except in fig-leaf form), dividing Korea at the 38th parallel and Vietnam at the 16th parallel, and seeking to unify China under Chiang Kai-shek"s rule by requiring j.a.panese soldiers in China to surrender to Nationalist forces, American decisions have shaped the basic structure of international relations in the East Asian region. The only part of that military division that did not hold was China, and after the Communists cleared the mainland in 1948-49 a new division took place: that between Taiwan and the People"s Republic of China (PRC), as the Seventh Fleet moved into the Taiwan Strait. MacArthur ruled j.a.pan as a benevolent emperor, while the Korean War resulted in a vastly deepened division of Northeast Asia: a heavily fortified demilitarized zone replaced the 38th parallel and remains to this day a museum of the defunct global cold war. For a generation China was excluded from the postwar global system by its own radicalism, and by American blockade and war threats. The archipelago of bases was the coercive structure that locked in the American position in the North Pacific, offering a diffuse but palpable leverage over allies. The United States had bases all over Western Europe, too; the difference was that unlike Europe, no NATO existed nor any ally capable of independent action. No one really cared whether the j.a.panese or Koreans or Filipinos or Chinese on Taiwan supported such policies, Americans just went ahead more or less as they pleased. The archipelago of empire in East Asia completely neutered the Pacific rivalry between j.a.pan and the United States that occupied the half-century before Pearl Harbor. An outgrowth of World War II and Korea, this extensive base structure now persists into the current century as if nothing had changed.
In 1947 George Kerman and Dean Acheson developed a strategy for j.a.pan"s revival: both understood that j.a.pan was the only serious industrial power in Asia and therefore the only serious military threat; Kerman wanted it again to be a strong military nation, to re-create the turn-of-the-century balance of power in East Asia, but Acheson was shrewder in shaping a j.a.pan with its industry revived and integrated into the American realm, an engine of the world economy and an American-defined "economic animal"-but one shorn of its prewar military and political clout. This occurred coterminously with the emergence of the cold war and deepened dramatically as j.a.pan benefited tremendously from America"s wars in Korea and Vietnam. Successive administrations wanted j.a.pan to "share burdens" in the defense of the Pacific, but because any enlargement would be done under the American security umbrella, j.a.pan"s leaders resisted all but foot-dragging and creeping rearmament, through incremental defense increases. Today the country still recalcitrantly spends less than i per cent of its GNP on defense, and it is still impossible to imagine another Admiral Togo building great aircraft carriers or another Admiral Yamamoto putting nuclear submarines in the water. j.a.pan remains entirely open to the permanent stationing of American "land, air, and sea forces in and about j.a.pan," in the words of the United Statesj.a.pan Security Treaty; the treaty also gave the United States the right to use the armed forces it stations in j.a.pan in anyway of its choosing-and it did so in Korea and Vietnam.21 The long-term result of this American unilateralism in East Asia may be summarized as follows: it was an asymmetrical hub-and-spokes system in which the noncommunist countries of the region tended to communicate with each other through the United States, a vertical regime solidified by bilateral defense treaties (with j.a.pan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines) and conducted by a State Department that towered over the foreign ministries of these four countries. The countries of the East Asian region might as well have been "hermit kingdoms" vis-a-vis each other, if not in relation to the United States: China didn"t talk to Taiwan or South Korea; not even personal mail pa.s.sed between the two Koreas; both Koreas hated j.a.pan; and j.a.panese diplomacy looked to the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia-but not to its near reaches. Each of them became semi-sovereign states, deeply penetrated by American military structures (operational control of the South Korean armed forces, U.S. Seventh Fleet patrolling of the Taiwan Strait, defense dependencies for all four countries, military bases on their territory), and incapable of anything resembling independent foreign policy or defense initiatives. The only serious breach in this system has been the rise of China, which put Taiwan in the shade of American concerns: but this change, too, owed as much to Richard Nixon"s opening to China as to anything the Chinese leadership did; Nixon, Kissinger, and Carter unceremoniously dumped Taiwan and the American treaty commitment to it. Of course, j.a.panese leaders have contributed to the continuing divisions of the region by failing to reckon seriously with their aggression against their neighbors, quite in contrast to Germany. But that, too, was originally something encouraged by American policy, the j.a.panese leaders it supported, and the very soft peace j.a.pan got in the late 1940s.
The postwar settlement thus remains the determining mechanism in explaining why East Asia, when compared to Europe, has so few multilateral inst.i.tutions and mechanisms of cooperation and conciliation today, and even fewer through most of the postwar period. There was and is no NATO. There once was a SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), but it never amounted to much, never sp.a.w.ned a NEATO, and died after two decades. There was a rump Marshall Plan (the ECA or Economic Cooperation Administration, which aided South Korea and Taiwan from 1947 onward). Like the Marshall Plan in Europe, the ECA was superseded by the revival of the advanced industrial economies-in this case the only one in the region, j.a.pan. Nothing like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) emerged, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was remote, and the theoretically all-inclusive United Nations was essentially an American operation in East Asia (as if anachronism, even atavism, were the name of the game, U.S. troops in Korea still sit under the blue flag of the 1950 United Nations Command). There is a modest alphabet soup of Southeast Asian international organizations-ASEAN, APEC, ARF-but none of these groups deploy the power and influence of a single American carrier task force, and even if they did, their tradition is one of mutual respect, never-ending consultation, and nonintervention in each other"s affairs-even the affairs of a human rights nightmare like Burma. Even where you might expect to find multilateral organizations-in the financial, monetary, and economic realm, given the economic strength of the regioncooperation "remains extremely limited, at least by European standards."22 Here too, the United States dominates.
China"s turn outward since the 1970s expressed the way in which economic forces in the region have eroded and bypa.s.sed cold war boundaries, bringing former adversaries back into contact-but primarily through business contacts and pop culture, not through multilateral inst.i.tutions. If the first phase of the cold war emphasized security considerations and divided the region, and the second phase exemplified the ascendancy of economic development and accelerated regional integration, it is important to remember that both these tendencies occurred primarily because of basic shifts in American foreign policy and the resulting pressures on East Asian states. Contemporary obstacles to deeper integration in the region also trace back to Washington (although not only to Washington). Later we will have occasion to examine how contemporary American policy toward the entire world increasingly seems like a redirection of the Pacific pattern of unilateralism. But that very pattern was also the elaboration of a century-long practice of moving and facing West, with allies absent and little concern for what the people in the way of that advance had to say. (If there is a precedent it certainly isn"t Atlanticism-Central American interventions bring us closer, but they were often part and parcel of Pacific expansionism.)23 General Order Number One, the seven-year occupation ofj.a.pan, and the security structures that still hold sway in the new century were, in this sense, Douglas MacArthur"s way of paying homage to his father-Pacificism, American-style.
Touring the Archipelago.
Okinawa functions as the "South Korea" ofj.a.pan, home to the only substantial marine contingent permanently stationed overseas (the Third Marine Expeditionary Force). New base construction in j.a.pan took off with the Korean War, but unlike South Korea, j.a.panese and American elites were able to jam the vast majority (around 75 percent) of U.S. bases into this small island, keeping them conveniently out of sight to most j.a.panese. (Okinawa is halfway to Taiwan from Tokyo, a three-hour plane ride.) j.a.pan provides about $5 billion a year in support of the seventy-three American bases on its territory, a bargain when compared to what j.a.pan would have to spend to defend itself; meanwhile the United States spends $40 to $43 billion annually for its East Asian security commitments, the majority of which are directed toward Korea. The Third Marine Expeditionary Force has about 16,ooo personnel and ioo aircraft, and the island houses another io,ooo personnel from the air force, army, and navy; an additional 22,434 dependents meant that in recent years some 5o,ooo Americans have resided on the island because of this expeditionary deployment. About 7,400 air force personnel and ioo aircraft are deployed at Kadena Air Force Base, including some 5o F-15 fighters of the air force"s Eighteenth Tactical Fighter Wing, 15 KC-135 airrefueling tankers, and 2 E-3 AWACS airborne warning and control system planes; with dependents and civilian employees, the base population is almost 25,000. A former j.a.panese air force base, Kadena is mammoth, covering 14,ooo acres with two runways of 3,650 meters, or nearly 4,000 yards; the largest air force base outside the United States, the full complex sits on 30,000 acres of prime land. The Defense Communications Detachment runs the largest direction-finding antenna in the world on Okinawa, surveilling all of Asia.
My visits to various bases in the summer of 2oo5 ill.u.s.trated the beauty of Okinawa and the enormous chunks of it given over to the American military-often the most beautiful parts, like Camp Courtney on a shimmering peninsula. Captain Danny Chung had organized my schedule from the beginning, but by the time I got there he was off in Pakistan providing relief to earthquake victims. I told his counterpart that this was admirable-but why do American soldiers always have to do these things? "That"s a great question," he replied, without further elaboration. I asked a marine commander if she thought sixty years was a long time to maintain bases on Okinawa: it is a long time, she agreed, but "we serve because we are ordered to serve." Logistical issues make it preferable for the marines to have forward bases, she said, and once you lose them you might not get them back-so what"s the point of letting them go? Another marine officer whom I met sat beneath the object of his political attentions: a map marking off the sentiments of local mayors and town leaders throughout Okinawa: red for opponents of the bases, white for supporters, and yellow for wobblers in the middle. Marine officers admitted that they weren"t quite sure what was behind Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld"s plans for a "Revolution in Military Affairs" but doubted that they would have much immediate effect on Okinawa. During a discussion of "China"s rise" with several officers, I again asked, why is that our problem? Why is it not aj.a.panese or Indian or Korean problem? They nodded, exchanged glances, didn"t say much; I knew this question was "above their pay grade," in the best sense: marine officers follow orders, and ultimately civilians make the policies. Various people informed me that 75 percent of U.S. troops in j.a.pan were not really in Okinawa, more like 5o percent; the United States contributed $771 million to the local economy in 2004; Americans were 4 percent of the Okinawa population but account for only i percent of island crimes-and so on.
Like Korea, this tight little island was always "good liberty" in soldiers" parlance, meaning women were easily available in the "Ville," a district full of saloons and wh.o.r.ehouses; one sailor remembered "a beautiful girl who danced naked with a huge python writhing around her" in a bar near Kadena"s Gate Two. One humid evening in September 1995, Kendrick Ledet and Rodrico Harp, marine privates from Georgia, and their friend Marcus Gill, a sailor from Texas, got roaring drunk in the Ville, stopped by a shop on the Kadena base for duct tape, and then kidnapped a young girl who emerged from a stationery store in her standard-issue school uniform with its short skirt and thick white socks. They drove into a field where the sugarcane was tall and took turns raping this twelve-year-old before leaving her by the roadside, bleeding and in shock. An instant hue and cry erupted in j.a.pan, made worse by the girl"s tender age and the race of her a.s.sailants: AfricanAmerican. The men were arrested by American military police two days later, who were under no obligation to turn them over to j.a.panese courts under the existing Status of Forces Agreement, which only fueled the rage over this incident. Walter Mondale, the U.S. amba.s.sador to j.a.pan, apologized profusely, but soon thousands of Okinawans were in the streets demanding that Americans simply get out and the bases be removed; by late October some 6o,ooo protesters mounted the largest demonstrations in Okinawan history. A few weeks later Admiral Richard C. Macke said the soldiers were not only wrong but st