Abstract
Reading this well presented work by Bruce Cumings is not fun. If you wish to have something to scan while your favorite program is on TV, skip Parallax Visions. It is an intense, profound, provocative book, but not an easy read.
Bruce Cumings and I are probably as different as two individuals can be. A professor at the University of Chicago, he is one of the country's foremost historians of East Asia, particularly Korea. His massive two-volume work, Origins of the Korean War, is widely thought of as definitive.
In contrast, I spent 28 years in the air force (intelligence, Strategic Air Command, Single Integrated Operations Plan). I became an Asian specialist, earned a Ph.D. at the Fletcher School, was associate dean of the National War College, wrote my principal book, Japan's Nuclear Option, and now teach at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech. Cumings takes a shot at practically all of those institutions, with the exception of the last.
Yet this is the kind of book that both private-and public-sector leaders of our nation–particularly those in positions of moral authority–ought to read carefully.
Parallax Visions is composed of eight chapters, only one of which was expressly written for it. Cumings dissects important issues in American relations with East Asia–the way American specialists address East Asia, the war with Japan, U.S. relations toward peripheral areas (Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam), commentary about the differences and similarities of “civil” society in the United States and Asia, the unique U.S. nuclear relationship with North Korea, U.S. relations with China, the U.S. scholastic community and its relationships with government, and the state of U.S. relations with East Asia.
In particular, Cumings explores the biting racism that has poisoned U.S. Asian relations over time, and he highlights the “lack of historical knowledge and sensibility about American strategy since 1945 … in the [academic] literature of American relations with East Asia.”
He accuses the rest of us of having a “built-in ahistoricity”–that is, we lack the historical context to understand what's going on today and what may happen tomorrow.
The United States and East Asia have much in common, suggests Cumings. Modern experiences on both sides of the Pacific are surprisingly similar. And, in passing, he takes some justified swipes at the Samuel Huntington argument regarding the clash of civilizations. Calling Huntington's account “reprehensible,” Cumings notes that Huntington divides East Asia into two separate and distinct non-Western civilizations, one Chinese, the other Japanese.
Such a “bifurcation would not occur to East Asian specialists,” Cumings writes, adding that perhaps Huntington sees an approaching clash between these two states that may benefit the United States.
Cumings is also critical of Huntington for not spending more time examining his own country and understanding the true nature of the American experience with Asia. He argues, for instance, that for most of the twentieth century, Japan was a subordinate partner with either the British or the Americans. In that context, he notes that William Howard Taft was the first American leader to “occasionally” flirt with a China-first policy, “only to be called back to the hard reality that Japan, with an advanced industrial base, is the most important power in East Asia.”
Taft's plans to develop the railroads in Manchuria under British-American auspices were thwarted by 1910 as Japan moved to consolidate the absorption of Korea. It was a tough lesson, but in the process, Cumings notes, the U.S. Navy decided to make Pearl Harbor “the chief American base in the Pacific.” And, he adds, the Taft administration “began systematic consideration of war with Japan.”
Cumings reveals a certain distrust of the Japanese. To be sure, he condemns the atomic bombings of Japan as a war crime and he calls the earlier fire bombings of Tokyo “genocidal.” But he also says that Japan practiced genocide against China and Korea. Some 20 million people died beginning in 1931, he says, because of Japan's “annihilation campaign.”
(He does not, however, dwell on Pearl Harbor, because it was “a coun-terforce attack directed exclusively at military targets in the “mere garden-variety aggression” category. Only 68 civilians were killed, he says.)
Cumings is hard on academics who worked for or in the government. He seems not to have met a military man who could complete a thought. And he calls for abolishing the CIA. (At a minimum he is particularly intent on getting “the intelligence and military agencies out of free academic inquiry.”)
Regarding the CIA, Cumings lets his anti-government and anti-military bias get the better of his judgment. Even George Washington depended on spies and intelligence as he led the movement to create a nation.
There are good reasons why gentlemen read other gentlemen's mail. That is a fundamental requirement for the United States in an era of ever increasing complexity. The need for oversight of such activities by concerned citizens, however, cannot be overstated. This is where scholars such as Cumings well serve U.S. interests.
In many other ways and for many other reasons I take exception to some of the specific points introduced by Cumings. He, for instance, devotes a lot of space to the argument over the number of lives that were believed to be at risk if the United States had to invade the Japanese home islands to end World War II.
As he introduces the work of others to make a point, the reader is told that military estimates at the time listed 25,000 as the number expected to be “lost,” that is, killed in an invasion of Kyushu.
This was far short, Cumings says, of “the half million to one million that Stimson and Truman later claimed.” There is, of course, a fundamental difference between deaths and “casualties.” The record shows that Truman stated that it would cost “at a minimum one quarter of a million casualties and might cost as much as a million.” (See Douglas J. MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan: Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision, December 1998, The Central Intelligence Agency, p.26.)
I also disagree with Cumings's attitude toward the soldiers who hold the opinion that the use of the atomic bomb “saved their necks.” He writes that “it is the job of the historian–not that of the soldier–to instruct us about the past.” More to the point, “They have no right to tell historians who know better that this justifies Truman's decision.” On the one hand, Cumings accuses Americans of being ahistorical; on the other, he sets up a priesthood of historians to interpret the word.
Finally, I take exception to his attempt to demonize the Pentagon whenever an opportunity presents itself. I admit that the Pentagon is a large target, but it is not a branch of government. At its ultimate helm are civilians, not military officers.
At one point, Cumings charges that “China is a metaphor for something else–for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings; for neoconservatives who no longer have a Left worthy of serious attack; for American idealists in search of themselves, in a country that also has lost its moral center; for an American polity that imagines itself coterminous with mankind and therefore cannot understand true difference.”
Such a comment about the Pentagon reveals a basic misunderstanding of the American policy process. The Pentagon, for sure, in its civilian and military aspects has a significant role in shaping security policy–but more in its execution than its formulation.
The security community as a whole establishes and shares the blame (or acclaim) for American security and foreign policy, not the Pentagon alone. This is why I strongly believe that scholars like Cumings should take an active part in shaping policy rather than excluding themselves from interaction with the security community.
Cumings's significant expertise could be well used by the Hart-Rudman Commission, for example, which will–over the course of the year–consider fundamental changes to the structure of the security community, setting its players in place for the next 50 years.
So, while I disagree with some of what Cumings says, he covers the field and he does it well. I will integrate his book into my current senior seminar at the Sam Nunn School. In this way some of the truly important issues of our time will be placed before some fine young minds. As for Bulletin readers, Parallax Visions is a must read.