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attitudes towards China and Japan is equally poor. He shows little appreciation of the effective American acquiescence in Japanese expansion during most of the 1930s, nor of the manner in which private American investments in and commerce with Japan undercut the professed United States policy of building up China. He gives one little sense of the dynamics of the inter-relationship between domestic American politics and the government's role in the Far East, nor of the manner in which the international crises in Europe and the Pacific were interconnected. To judge by the sources cited in the notes, he did not consult the works of Irvine H. Anderson, Jr., Roberta A. Dayer, Michael H. Hunt, Jerry Israel, David Reynolds, Jonathan G. Utley, or Paul A. Varg, but relied largely on a traditional and dated interpretation of United States policies towards both Japan and China. One hopes that, should a second edition appear, these chapters will be rewritten to take these factors into account.
Happily, Dudden escapes from these doldrums to give a workmanlike account of the familiar territory of the Pacific War, the effect of the developing Cold War, the American occupation of Japan, the Communist takeover of China, and American intervention in Korea and Vietnam. This was the period in which American involvement in the Pacific region increased exponentially, so that by the mid-1950s the United States was the guarantor of the security of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and most of the Southeast Asian nations, and had bases scattered through the Pacific. While he does not, perhaps, bring out the theme of the extent to which American policies in Asia were generated by considerations arising from developments in Europe, his survey is solid and thorough. One may perhaps regret that he apparently did not make use of recent works by such scholars as Bruce Cumings, Rosemary Foot, and Christopher Thorne, but his coverage of the period of maximum American military commitment to Asia is essentially sound.
Dudden's final chapter, on the 1970s and 1980s, is inevitably inconclusive. The growing United States tendency to turn inwards and concentrate on the country's own domestic problems; the commercial rivalry with its ally and protégé Japan, and to some extent with South Korea and Taiwan; the love-hate relationship between America and China, particularly since the Tiananmen Square Incident of June 1989; the ambivalent relationship between the United States and the Philippines, still fatally ready to make their old colonial sovereign