But as prescient as Washington’s planners were about the political blowback from bases, they thought little about the economic consequences. They propped up Japan’s economy, including allowing it to discriminate against U.S. imports, on the assumption that it would be a regional powerhouse but never a rival to the United States. As John Foster Dulles, who presided over the treaty ending the occupation, put it, Japanese products had “little future” in the United States. They were just “cheap imitations of our own goods.” Dulles was, to put it gently, wrong about that. What he didn’t
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