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2 - Visions of the Asian Periphery

Vietnam (1964–1968) and the Philippines (1898–1900)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2013

Andreas W. Daum
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
Lloyd C. Gardner
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Wilfried Mausbach
Affiliation:
Freie Universität Berlin
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Summary

“I once drew a map for Dean Rusk and said, 'This is your map of the world.' I had a tiny United States with an enormous Vietnam lying right off our coast.” With this ironic image, George Ball, in-house critic of the Johnson administration, described the enormous importance with which his government had endowed the peripheral Asian nation. For the most part, this skewed vision, verging on obsession, has been analyzed in the context of Cold War bipolarity. Because a direct confrontation between the central powers - the United States and the Soviet Union - no longer was an option in the nuclear age, it was transferred to the periphery in wars between client states or in limited wars in which one or both superpowers more or less directly intervened. The periphery thus did not matter so much in its own right as in relation to the power struggle at the center.

A diachronic approach to American foreign policy, juxtaposing the discursive construction of the Asian periphery in the Vietnam War with that in the conflict over Philippine annexation following the Spanish-American War, reveals that such a symbolic sublimation of the periphery's importance has been a perennial feature in American worldviews and that it therefore was conditioned not solely by the particular constellation of the Cold War. In both cases, the interventionist discourse on the periphery was guided by two rhetorical strategies that may at first seem contradictory but that were actually mutually supportive. First, the importance of the Philippines and Vietnam was vastly exaggerated; second, racist or cultural stereotypes fixed the periphery in a hierarchical relationship to the center.

Type
Chapter
Information
America, the Vietnam War, and the World
Comparative and International Perspectives
, pp. 43 - 64
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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