The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict

by Elbridge A. Colby

This criterion for US strategy also helps explain a puzzle left by the conventional narrative of American strategic history, which identifies the nation’s entry into the Second World War and its international leadership afterward as embodying a national shift from isolationism to internationalism. This account overlooks the United States’ long history of active engagement in Asia, which dates back at least to the occupation of the Philippines and the Open Door Policy, and even to the opening of Japan in the 1850s. A more parsimonious account explains US behavior as resulting from the increasing importance of its role in ensuring that no other state could dominate a region key to American interests, not from a wholesale transformation in the United States’ conception of its role in the world.