Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
112
incorporated within the Grand Area instead of developing as part of a
“new order” with Japan as its industrial center, from which the US
might be excluded; concern over this prospect was a factor in the
complex interactions that led to the Japanese-American war. But, it was
feared, social and economic development in Indochina in terms that
might be meaningful to the Asian poor might cause the rot to spread
through Southeast and South Asia, leading Japan to associate itself with
a bloc of nations independent of the Grand Area, or even worse, to
accommodate to the Soviet bloc. A 1949 report of the State Department
Policy Planning Staff urged that Washington should “develop the
economic interdependence between [Southeast Asia] as a supplier of
raw materials, and Japan, Western Europe and India as suppliers of
finished goods . . .,” so that “the region could begin to fulfill its major
function as a source of raw materials and a market for Japan and
Western Europe.” 62 In this context, Vietnam gained a significance as a
rotten apple that it did not have for American planners on its own.
Such thinking is not original to American planners; similar concerns
had been evoked, for example, by the American revolution. A few days
before the Monroe Doctrine was announced, the Czar of Russia warned:
Too many examples demonstrate that the contagion of
revolutionary principles is arrested by neither distance nor physical
obstacles. It crosses the seas, and often appears with all the
symptoms of destruction which characterize it, in places where
not even any direct contact, any relation of proximity might give
ground for apprehension. France knows with what facility and
promptitude a revolution can be carried from America to Europe.
Metternich feared that the Monroe Doctrine would “lend new strength
to the apostles of sedition, and reanimate the courage of every