The Pacific pactomania: At the origins of the San Francisco system

For almost 80 years after the end of World War II, the U.S. military and political alliances formed the core of the regional order in both Western Europe and East Asia. Nowadays, the post-war network of American alliances remains a key component of their international security policy, aimed at ensuring military superiority over existing and potential rivals on the Eurasian continent. At the same time, the U.S. approaches to alliance building in the Pacific had certain peculiarities from the very beginning. In order to better understand them, as well as to identify the general principles of U.S. regional policymaking, it seems appropriate to study the genesis of the so-called San Francisco system, a complex of military-political arrangements between the United States and Asian states that developed in the early years of the Cold War. The core of this system is a series of agreements between the United States and a number of regional actors, including Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, and Taiwan. The article examines the course of negotiations and the content of agreements between the United States and each of these countries. According to the author, these agreements can be roughly divided into ‘guarantee’ and ‘reinsurance’ treaties. The former can be exemplified by the triple Pacific Security Treaty engaging Australia and New Zealand, which provided the allies with U.S. guarantees in the event of resurging Japanese militarism; mutual security agreements with the Republic of Korea and Taiwan stand for the latter. By concluding them, the United States sought, on the one hand, to guarantee the security of the allies crucial for the ‘Roll-back of Communism’ strategy, and, on the other, to ensure against any reckless steps by their leaders, minimizing the risk of the U.S. involvement in a nuclear war with the ‘Communist bloc’. The image of a ‘wheel with a hub and spokes’ was used to describe the established structure of allied relations. This ‘geometry’ of the links within the Pacific Rim appeared to be quite stable and, as a result, the San Francisco system, which was initially ad hoc, continues to exist today, albeit in a somewhat modified form.

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