Sarantakes also highlights the inconsistencies in British policy and strategy
throughout the interwar period. Beginning in the early 1920s, the Admiralty
designated Japan as enemy number one, developing plans for defeating the
IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy). Yet its plans focused exclusively on naval engage-
ments that were divorced from an overarching strategy for compelling Japan to
do Britain’s will. Compounding matters, on the home front, the British populace
had neither the political nor the financial appetite to adequately support such a
maritime endeavor in Asia. Thus ensued a kind of strategic immobility that per-
sisted until the outbreak of the Pacific War. The author portrays the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, which helped forge the Anglo-American alliance
overnight, as an enormous blunder that rescued the British from their strategic
dilemma. Victory nonetheless exacted a steep price: the campaigns in the Pacific
permanently shattered the British Empire in Asia. Sarantakes concludes that luck
is a poor substitute for sound policy.
Bernard D. Cole reviews the history of U.S. engagement in Asia. Cole depicts
U.S. maritime strategy in the region as a makeshift affair, driven by events and
needs of the moment more than by systematic evaluation of the strategic environ-
ment, U.S. interests, and strategies able to achieve these interests with available
resources. Only with the writings and advocacy of Alfred Thayer Mahan and
like-minded sea-power proponents did U.S. strategy take on some semblance of
rational decision-making. Yet even Mahanian theory created problems for the
United States in the region, exhorting Washington to obtain overseas naval
bases—most prominently the Philippine Islands—that in effect offered hostages
to potent regional sea powers such as Imperial Japan. The author observes that
the United States has further expanded its interests in the region since the down-
fall of the Soviet Union, declaring safe passage through all important Asian sea
lanes, geographic chokepoints, and even rivers to be a matter of concern for
Washington. Whether the U.S. Navy has the resources to discharge its ambitious
new duties is a doubtful prospect, suggests Cole, leaving the navy in the position
of trying to augment its resources with those of allies and coalition partners.
Andrew S. Erickson ventures a net assessment of China’s growing maritime
capacity. Many Chinese officials and military scholars, contends Erickson,
espouse ‘‘their own universal logic of sea power, with both Mahanian and Marxist
undercurrents.’’ Even so, the nation’s naval development is seemingly ‘‘con-
strained less by ideology than by capabilities.’’ The People’s Liberation Army
Navy (PLA Navy or PLAN) is evolving along lines quite dissimilar to other
navies in East Asia, including the U.S. Navy. Indeed, Beijing evinces no particu-
lar urgency about constructing aircraft-carrier expeditionary groups like those
that represent the core of the U.S. Navy fleet. But will the PLA Navy’s strategy
and force-structure plans allow it to achieve command of the sea, and how will
Beijing interpret command of the sea? Will China become a true maritime power
any time soon?
Introduction 11