World War II marked a rupture in the spread of Western colonialism. Between 1941 and 1945, Japanese forces besieged the Euro-American empires in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands; unlikely alliances between the colonized and the colonizers were momentarily forged. The expansion of Japanese militarism intensified anticolonial resistance in Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere. At the end of the war, as European powers sought to regain control of their colonies from the ruins of the shattered Japanese empire, they encountered emboldened nationalists for whom independence seemed at long last a reality. Anticolonial revolts across the next decade and beyond spelled the demise of Western colonialism in Asia; the Philippines, India, Malaya, Indonesia, Korea, and Vietnam all secured formal independence.14 Another world seemed on the horizon.
Decolonization, however, was disorderly and fraught with difficulty, for formal independence hardly ushered in sustainable democracies in a postimperial world. Instead, throwing off the colonizer’s yoke was merely the beginning of an ongoing political project to secure more substantive freedoms beyond the moment of independence.15 As the second half of the twentieth century went on, people who had spent much of their lives fighting the oppression of a single colonizer found themselves confronting a new and more complex imperial power. This was a murkier empire, one that projected an intention to spread freedom and liberate people from oppression, yet embraced some of the same repressive tactics of the Japanese empire.
The United States emerged from World War II as an undisputed world power, with a preponderance of military might and economic influence.16 The new U.S. empire did not seek hegemony merely through colonial possessions, as it had done in the nineteenth century, but instead through two seemingly less coercive means. The first was domination of the global economy, in which the government enacted policies to foster capitalism as the basis for an integrated “free world.” The second was militarization, a broad and evolving concept that included short occupations, the maintenance of bases, and the stationing of military advisory groups. Insofar as the military was needed to make the world safe for capitalism, the two went hand in hand. Asia and the Pacific became the site of this renewed onslaught. As country after country declared their independence, the United States rushed in to establish bilateral relations to keep them within the capitalist orbit. This “hub-and-spokes” system, in which each state was informally tied to all the others through their economic dependence on the United States and other core industrial nations, created a new map of empire.17 It would be wrong to suggest this new U.S. empire was any less territorial than the colonial empire of the past. In addition to maintaining informal influence over this network of states, the United States also continued to administer formal control over the Pacific Islands, including Guam, the Northern Marianas, the Marshall Islands, and Okinawa, as part of its expanding empire of bases for military deployment and weapons testing.18
FIGURE 1. Asia and the Pacific. (Map by William L. Nelson.)
The United States’s post-1945 empire essentially reanimated old colonial dynamics in the region. By the early 1950s, Japan, under American aegis, had revived its industrial capacity to produce export goods, part of a broader scheme by the United States to transform Japan into an engine of capitalist development in Asia.19 U.S. dominance in the region depended on securing Japan as a “subempire,” or a surrogate of U.S. power; and war became vital to this effort.20 Since World War II, the United States has been at war continuously. The Korean War (1950–53) and the Vietnam War (1954–73) were instantiations of what historian Thomas McCormick called a “Rimlands War,” to secure the extractive economies of Northeast and Southeast Asia and to ensure Japan’s place as a proxy for U.S. control. They were the start of a permanent war in U.S. culture that set into motion a range of military and economic activities across the Pacific including offshore procurement, the building of infrastructure, the training of armed forces, and the mobilization of civilian workers. These wars, fought in the name of anticommunism, “liberated” these countries to make them functional within the global economy and accessible to free markets and free trade.
Throughout this book we’ll refer to these overlapping efforts as the “decolonizing Pacific,” a term that names the historical conjuncture when anticolonial movements in the United States, Asia, and the Pacific became intertwined with the U.S. militarization drive to secure the global capitalist economy. The decolonizing Pacific is not a fixed temporal or geographic construct but a methodology for explaining the convergent forces that animated the U.S. empire after 1945. At its core, it explains how decolonization was not antithetical to the spread of U.S. global power but intrinsic to it. Over the last half-century, the United States has been an increasingly vocal proponent of democracy and equality; yet this commitment has simultaneously worked to legitimate and obscure U.S. state violence. Here we will explore the ways that racial liberalism was materially enacted through the functional expansion of the U.S. military in Asia and the Pacific. Time and again, U.S. state officials declared their support of an “Asia for Asians”—the racialist language propagated by the Japanese empire during World War II—to pursue capitalist integration under the banner of anticolonialism and antiracism.
Here was a new racial order taking shape, in which the government’s disavowal of racism and nominal support for anticolonial sovereignty gave rise to new forms of state violence against insurgents, communists, and a growing group of people marked for permanent exclusion from the “free world.” The term “race war” is useful for explaining this emerging relationship of U.S. imperial governance in the post–World War II era, in which preexisting forms of racism and extant colonial relations were recalibrated to justify war in inclusionary terms.21 Black anticolonial thinkers such as Cedric Robinson and W.E.B. Du Bois were among the most incisive critics of the cold war as an ongoing imperial race war against the “darker peoples” of the colonial world.22 Even as race as a category of differentiation appears to recede in significance in the age of global decolonization, “war,” Du Bois reminded us in 1953, “tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.”23 War, in other words, was central to reproducing U.S. race relations and making its attendant violence normal in the face of a rapidly changing post-1945 world.
At the same time, the U.S. militarization of Asia and the Pacific made other forms of decolonization—namely, the realization of freedom and self-determination beyond the nation-state form—a permanently suspended and incomplete project.24 Thinking through the decolonizing Pacific thus also forces us to reckon with what’s left, of what remains from a truncated attempt at liberation. As militarization foreclosed particular forms of postcolonial sovereignty in the region, the dreams and aspirations of the formerly colonized did not end but were channeled elsewhere. The military became a vehicle that conveyed these desires. People were drawn to the military, enticed by the prospects of steady pay and economic mobility. Some saw joining the armed forces as a way to overcome the racial degradations of colonialism by embodying a martial masculinity. Still others, insistent that a different