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hardcover $38.00
Yale University Press
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More reviews by Kerry Brown
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Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power by Bruce Cummings
BRUCE CUMMINGS has written extensively about Asia, and in particular North East Asia. So this 500-page study of the US might appear to mark a change of direction. However, as Professor Cummings says in his introduction, the United States has two vast ocean-facing boundaries, one to the Atlantic and one to the Pacific, and for much of its history, it would be better characterised as a power looking west, to Asia, not east, back towards Europe. Only for the last 50 years, he argues, has the policy making elite in Washington in the State Department and the upper echelons of the government been Atlantacists, biased by background and outlook to Europe. But he argues that the US's default as a Pacific nation is returning. The increasing economic importance of China, and India -- along with the continuing alliances with Japan and Australia, mean that from economic and political imperatives the US is now facing towards Asia from its west coast, rather than towards what former US Defence secretary Don Rumsfield rather dismissively called "Old Europe" from its east coast. This excellent book, full of interesting perceptions and facts, and energetically told, is a disquisition on why, and how, this has happened.
One of Cummings' main themes is that the very creation of the US happened by looking towards the West, conquering, buying, and sometimes simply appropriating territory as it expanded from the original 13 states, onwards to 30, 40 and finally 50 states. Alaska and Hawaii were the final pieces in this vast jigsaw puzzle. Some of this history is hideous and painful. Cummings gives the bare statistics for those native to the conquered or annexed lands who were then decimated by the new settlers. In New Mexico, in a generation, the native population fell from its original number to a mere tenth of this. This is what disease, genocidal campaigns, and sheer force of new settlements achieved. As Cummings eloquently states, the US mindset has been "one of a killer", embarking on battles and war campaigns in which its own fatalities have been minimal, those of the conquered massive.
The extraordinary story of California and the construction from 1850 of a new society and economy there takes up the middle section of this book. In cities like Los Angeles, car ownership from 1920 literally rebuilt a new culture and urban geography, with a range of innovations which have spread throughout the world, from drive ins, to department stores, to garage stations and shopping malls. The real achievement in this period however was simply to be able to supply sustainable sources of water, through massive damn building projects funded by the federal government during Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, to these new, rapidly growing settlements, allowing them to expand even faster. Huge migrations into California provoked a massive process of urbanisation from the 1920s onwards. Things happened at such a pace, that the first signs of a society less marked by racial strife and conflict appeared. People barely had time and energy to pick fights with each other. In the 21st century, whites are now a minority in the most populous state. But it still ranks as the world's seventh largest economy, and a place, with the silicon valley, of dizzying innovation -- a true vindication of strength through diversity.
A further theme of Cummings' book, as he moves to discussing Seattle, Alaska, and other key locations on the West coast, is the big role that the federal government played in, for instance, building up the massive aerospace industry which was, in the mighty figure of Boeing, to be based largely in the west rather than over in the east coast. The Second World War marked a sea change in perceptions, breaking down isolation, allowing huge influxes of government spending, and creating a new sort of economy and political culture. Hawaii became the key military base, looking out into the vast Pacific region, and, once Japan was conquered, linking with a series of other strategic bases to create a kind of protective wall from which the US was able to project its power, and support its interests. In once fascinating chapter, Cummings looks at the US's military installations and bases across the world -- amounting to from 760 to over 800, ranging from massive presences in South Korea, Japan and the Middle East, to smaller and far less better known places elsewhere. This extraordinary reach compels Cummings to call this a truly global military-defence entity the like of which the world has never seen, and, in his conclusion, allows him to say some sobering things about the chances of a contender like China or India being able to knock the US easily from its current perch. In 1970, he says, the US was 30% of global GDP. It remains exactly the same today. China and India have risen, but at the expense of Europe (a fall from 40 to 31% over the same time). On most of the indicators of technical and military, and economic, innovation, the US still leads, and by a considerable margin. And in many of these areas it is on the West coast that the real work is done.
This is a bold, and a big, book, and one which throws up something new on almost every page. There are interesting vignettes on some of the great figures of West Coast development, from politicians from California like Nixon (whose arrival at the White House marked the moment when the largest state became recognised as not just an economic, but also a political force), to Bill Gates, to the early pioneers of the aviation, film, oil and car industry. One message that does come across in this book is how precipitant talk of the US's decline actually is. The other is that Europe needs to think long and hard about its real role in the world now, faced with a truly epoch defining dynamism between Asia and America. Perhaps as the greatest symbol of this, the current incumbent in the White House spent his formative years on Hawaii, the outward state-island on which the Pacific Command is located, and has shown far greater comfort dealing with Pacific issues than Atlantic ones. The Washington Atlantacist consensus at least in this area looks set to change.
Kerry Brown
04/02/2010
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