Bridging Troubled Waters: China, Japan, and Maritime Order in the East China Sea
James Manicom. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. 280 pp. Notes. Index. Bibliography. $32.95.
Reviewed by James Holmes
James Manicom (research fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Ontario) has founded a nifty volume on a premise mariners will find intuitively obvious. Namely, that conflict and war are not foreordained. People have a choice. Countries that compete furiously in one area can cooperate in undertakings such as maritime counterterrorism and counterproliferation. China and Japan can, say, send flotillas to the U.S. Navy’s RIMPAC maneuvers even while they remain at loggerheads in home waters.
By accentuating the positive while managing the negative, writes Manicom, political leaders can improve the overall tenor of relations. Prospects for concord brighten over time. This is the task before peacemakers in East Asia. And there is some basis for optimism. In past decades Beijing and Tokyo collaborated in reasonable harmony to manage fisheries, conduct marine research, and develop natural resources. Only in recent years has the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands scuttled common endeavors of this type.
The trick for diplomats, then, is not to let wrangling over maritime space—islands, the surrounding waters and seabed, the airspace overhead—bleed over into cooperative enterprises, thence poisoning overall Sino-Japanese relations. That’s a tall order. Animosity in the East China Sea isn’t about uninhabited rocks jutting out of the water. It’s about sovereignty. It’s about the two countries’ places in the Asian hierarchy. Indeed, it’s about the nature of the maritime order itself. These are questions that rouse strong passions on both sides of the Yellow Sea—and work against a nautical entente.
Yet Manicom claims that the two contenders can collaborate explicitly on relatively apolitical matters while, perhaps, working together tacitly in more controversial endeavors. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Think back to those thrilling days of “freedom fries,” when Americans thought France was sabotaging a just war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Despite backbiting at the diplomatic level and on op-ed pages, though, Paris and Washington kept sharing intelligence and cooperating on operational matters. It proved possible to disentangle routine cooperation from the impassioned debate over invading Iraq. A transatlantic relationship dating to 1778 outlasted temporary discord.
Or, more to the point, consider the counter-piracy campaign in the Gulf of Aden. Contingents from many navies, including China’s and Japan’s, have patrolled pirate-infested waters off Somalia since late 2008. By most accounts, few quarrels have marred the multinational squadron’s police work. But here’s the rub: Counter-piracy in distant waters is easy. Every seafaring nation wants to suppress banditry. It’s bad for trade. And the Gulf of Aden lies far from the East China Sea. No one claims territory or water space there.
Fighting pirates, then, is both expedient and intrinsically apolitical. It promotes common interests, and there’s not much to squabble over. In short, counter-piracy off Somalia is an easy case that demonstrates how hard cooperation can be under more trying circumstances. China and Japan can cooperate far from Asian shores, but they play by different—bare knuckles—rules in East Asia.
How could it be otherwise? Geography situated the rivals facing each other across the Yellow and East China seas while granting each leverage over nearby seas and skies. Look at the map. The Japanese archipelago encloses north China, giving the Japan Self-Defense Forces say-so over east-west movement between the China seas and the Western Pacific. For its part, China’s People’s Liberation Army adjoins shipping lanes whereby warships and merchantmen pass north-south along the Asian seaboard. Position bestows influence.
But brute geostrategic facts aren’t the only spur for competition. History has seen China and Japan struggle for mastery in Asia, often murderously. China is Asia’s traditional central power, but Japan defeated China in a naval war 120 years ago and went on to invade its neighbor in the 1930s. Conquest made Japan supreme in this intensely status-conscious region. That rankles with patriotic Chinese. Neither geography nor history can change. Diplomats have much to overcome now that both countries have their dander up over territory, sovereignty, and national dignity—some of the most basic causes of acrimony and war.
Executing James Manicom’s strategy—draining the venom from Sino-Japanese relations while creating space for an apolitical working relationship—will demand statesmanship of the first order, along with goodwill on both sides. As America pivots to Asia, Bridging Troubled Waters makes a worthy addition to naval commanders’ bookshelves and is strongly recommended.
The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare
Jimmy L. Bryan Jr., Ed. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013. 288 pp. Biblio. Index. Illus. $55.
Reviewed by Jennifer D. Keene
In the last few decades, war-and-society scholars have carved out a distinct sub-field within military history. Although there is some blending around the edges, these scholars focus primarily on how war shapes and impacts society and societal institutions. In contrast, military historians emphasize military command, operations, strategy, and effectiveness. The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare questions where culture fits into this mix. In the introduction, editor Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. makes a distinction between examining “war and culture” and the “cultural history of American warfare.” In the volume’s last essay, “Marshalling the Imaginary, Imagining the Martial: Or, What Is at Stake in the Cultural Analysis of War?” Amy S. Greenberg joins with Bryan to demark the boundaries of these subfields.
They propose that “war and culture” privileges how culture influences war-makers, while the “cultural history of American warfare” investigates how war shapes American culture. In this formulation, war-and-society scholars emphasize social structures and relationships along with empirical evidence. Uncovering the cultural history of American warfare requires focusing on “imagined moments” as well as the subjectivity of experience to reveal the values and assumptions of Americans engaged in warfare.
The essays in the collection put this methodology into practice by analyzing how violence, pain, gender, race, memory, entertainment, and religion shaped the American martial imagination and rendered warfare meaningful. Overall these works are all well researched and written. Yet there are some standouts.
Jason Phillips rejects the standard answer scholars give to explain why men initially volunteered to fight in the Civil War: the expectation of a short war. Instead he brings to light the prophecies of a long and difficult struggle contained within the letters of some soldiers. He contends that recovering how, not just what, soldiers thought reveals their forward-thinking belief that the war was a struggle for the nation’s future.
Belinda Linn Rincón investigates Evangelina Cisneros, a Cuban rebel famously rescued from prison by a reporter from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, and writes her voice back into the history of the Spanish-American War of 1898. The gendering of her story on both the Cuban and American side reveals how she became a vehicle for constructing an image of Cuban revolutionary femininity and American chivalric masculinity. Bonnie M. Miller compares U.S. representations of the “Latin Race” in the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars, conflicts that established the tropes of Latin peoples as either feminized victims, racialized bandits, or childlike pupils, which dominated the American imagination in the 19th and 20th centuries.
John M. Kinder’s essay on the militarization of zoos transforms the image of zoos as innocuous places to take children on a Sunday afternoon into an institution at the forefront of the Cold War. Helping devastated European zoos rebuild and fostering improved international relations through the exchanges of rare species, American zoos played a supporting role in the development of American global leadership.
Jeremy K. Saucier considers new recruitment methods within the post-Vietnam military. With the hyper-masculine warrior image discredited, the Army turned to a new emphasis on the multicultural and diverse racial makeup of the nation’s new volunteer force. These ads “sought to portray the army as an ideal and harmonious representation of the nation,” he writes. Besides inclusion, the Army also advertised the military as aligned with American values, particularly equality and merit-based advancement.
Old myths were hard to put behind, however, as Susan L. Eastman reveals in her examination of Randall Wallace’s 2002 film We Were Soldiers. The film resurrected the heroic myths of World War II combat films while recounting the tale of young soldiers fighting a three-day battle in the Ia Drang Valley during the Vietnam War. Recasting the Vietnam War as a “good war” comparable to World War II became an exercise in forgetting loaded with political significance. Erasing any remaining discomfort Americans might have with Vietnam became a way of valorizing the nation’s involvement in two questionable post-9/11 conflicts.
These are ambitious and often stimulating essays that offer intriguing snapshots of particular historical moments, innovative use of sources, and original thinking. Whether they collectively succeed in defining a new field or approach to the study of warfare, however, is debatable. One problem is the lack of coherence in either theme, topic, or question to unify the collection. Culture itself remains undefined, and the distinction between culture and society is not addressed within the body of most essays. The editor and authors, however, raise key questions about subfield boundaries and methods that deserve further scrutiny, while offering a tantalizing look at the way a cultural approach can expand our understanding of how Americans experience war.
Brothers Forever: The Enduring Bond Between a Marine and a Navy Seal that Transcended Their Ultimate Sacrifice
Tom Sileo and Colonel Tom Manion (USMC, Retired). Boston: Da Capo Press, 2014. 312 pp. Notes. Index. Illus. $25.99.
Review by Lieutenant Andrew Cox, U.S. Navy
Brothers Forever, by Tom Sileo and Colonel Tom Manion (USMC, Ret.), makes for tough, emotional reading. The biography of Manion’s son, Travis, and his friend Brendan Looney starts when they met at the U.S. Naval Academy and follows them through their participation in the war on terror. Travis led Marines in Iraq, while Brendan deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a SEAL. Although both men died in combat—Travis was killed by a sniper and Brendan’s helicopter crashed in Afghanistan—the book continues through their families’ grief and ends with how they came to be buried in Arlington cemetery, side by side, in deserved tribute to their inspiring lives and friendship.
Sacrifice and service are the major themes of these men. Through their formative years, their training, and into combat, both are genuinely excited at the prospect of deployment and making a difference in the war. Their signature phrases, Manion’s “If not me, then who . . .” and Brendan’s “I don’t quit,” represent all that we expect of our military today: an unflagging work ethic, heroic courage, striking humility, and truly selfless consciences. The quality of these two and others who serve with them makes America all the poorer for their absence.
The strongest section of the book also produces its most poignant moments: the families’ notifications of their deaths. Witnessing the wrenching despair of the Manion and Looney families, rippling outward to others, was heartbreaking. Every day they encounter physical reminders and spatial voids that the two friends left behind: They were just here. Buoyed by a torrent of support, the families held public memorials to remind Americans of the consequences of these two wars. Their loved ones would have approved. “I am not sure the average American sees the positives these servicemen and women accomplish or even understands the sacrifices of their efforts,” Travis wrote to his local newspaper before his death. The reader must reflect on it as well.
Unfortunately, the book’s numerous flaws distract from an otherwise amazing story. Besides cliché phrases and trite summary, the biggest issue might be Travis and Brendan themselves, who are presented as supermen. Their Academy days and military training show a nearly untroubled past, where nobody is ever in any real danger of failure. We are privy to the inner thoughts from both men so many times that any tension becomes instead a constant, predictable patter of patriotism and heroism. Moreover, can anyone claim to know what really goes through someone else’s mind, especially during combat? The narrative’s consistency strains credulity here.
For a story about war and warriors, the book glosses over quite a lot of context, aside from naming other notable casualties and commenting on the severely divided American public at home. What we get, through our heroes, is a drumbeat narrative of the U.S. military fighting evil in the Middle East, which simply doesn’t do justice to the truth of the complexity of either war, nor to those who died. It is troubling to this reviewer that no one ever reflected on why these two died overseas. All who choose to serve accept the inherent dangers of the military. Still, a deeper exploration of their deaths would have been completely appropriate here.
Colonel Manion is a respected veteran, and Sileo has written elsewhere about similar military sacrifices. They have commendable ideals in writing this story, but their methods are worrisome because placing our war dead on unattainable pedestals actually harms both the military and the public. Brendan and Travis were fallible people (like every other American)who lived lives of incredible service and bravery (unlike most Americans). We should honor that, but perpetuating overt hero-worship of the service worsens the “civil-military gap.” Mythologizing ourselves won’t make civilians understand our sacrifices any better, just as more yellow ribbons and flags won’t force the public to consider carefully about where and how we employ our military in the future. It’s certainly not what people like Brendan and Travis died for, at least.