CHAPTER 4
CLIPPER SHIPS TO CARRIERS:
U.S. MARITIME STRATEGY IN ASIA
Bernard D. Cole
The United States enters the twenty-first century with the strongest navy in the
world, one at least equal in global dominance to that deployed by Great Britain
in 1815, at the time of the final defeat of Napoleonic France. While the current
American naval dominance is global in capability, like that of its British predeces-
sor, it is concentrated on Asian issues, with forces in the Pacific and Indian oceans
and their contingent gulfs and seas. This Asia-centric maritime strategy derives
from nearly two centuries of U.S. interests in Far Eastern waters, interests that
have been primarily commercial in nature but have been accompanied by a
surprising focus on religious issues.
Missionaries—almost entirely Protestant—ventured out from the United
States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to carry their version of
the gospel to the peoples of Asia. These two elements of the American popula-
tion, businessmen and missionaries, were not hesitant about calling on elected
and appointed U.S. government officials for assistance. As the increasingly
chaotic conditions of nineteenth-century China devolved into outright revolu-
tion in 1911, after the overthrow of the last Qing emperor, demands for military
protection rose. The U.S. Navy was the most flexible force available to provide
the necessary protection for the nascent American imperialists. By the end of
the nineteenth century, U.S. warships were patrolling China’s rivers, a mission
formalized in 1902 with the organization of the Asiatic Fleet, which came to
include Yangtze River and Canton Delta patrol forces.
These naval units were assisted by U.S. Army and Marine Corps units after the
1899 Boxer Rebellion, but it was the gunboats and destroyers that carried
the American message of armed defenseinto the interior of China during the
opening decades of the twentieth century. This mission was soon subsumed by