Vietnam made it plain that we need a new perspective on our past relations with East Asia. Have our relations there always depended in the last analysis on bombs and bullets or at least the threat of bombs and bullets held in reserve? Or has our reliance on military firepower been a new thing, a recent aberration? The answer is mixed. The Western position in East Asia during the past century was maintained by force, but the force was usually European, seldom American. And before the spread of nationalism and modern technology to East Asia, not so much force was needed to maintain a Western position, and not so much firepower was available. Our use of violence in Vietnam was not unprecedented or aberrant so much as tragically out of date, disastrously out of proportion, as though the nineteenth-century principle of gunboat diplomacy (using superior firepower to impose one's will on local authorities) could be inflated to the level of coercing whole peoples from outside.

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The United States and China John King Fairbank

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