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W Taylor Fain, Cold War Through an Oceanic Lens, Diplomatic History, 2025;, dhaf037, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhaf037
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Since Fernand Braudel’s day, at least, the history of the oceans and the maritime world has inspired an enormous volume of scholarship that illuminates the vast, hydrous borderlands between nations and peoples. This “new thalassology” takes as an article of faith Braudel’s insight that the oceans, far from being barriers, are highways that connect peoples and cultures.1 The history of the oceanic world has principally been explored by scholars of the ancient through colonial eras and has mostly parsed the commercial exchanges, migratory patterns, and cultural contacts among seafaring peoples and the nations of the oceanic littorals. Few have carried this study into the modern period or the realm of international security. Enter Kuan-Jen Chen, whose book Charting America’s Cold War Waters in East Asia asks, “what can we learn about the Cold War from a maritime perspective?” (291).
Chen contends that there is much of importance to be gleaned by examining Cold War East Asia through an “oceanic lens.” His book invites readers to rethink how the western Pacific Ocean, formerly regarded as a geostrategic barrier, “functions as a barometer that can allow one to comprehend the untold stories embedded in the interactions between the United States and its East Asian allies and enemies alike during the Cold War” (291). Maritime East Asia acted as an important theater of the East-West conflict between 1945 and the end of the 1970s and “served not only as a geographic space in which to project military influence, but also as an invisible channel that linked up America’s allies into an anti-Communist blue rampart against the Soviet Union and China” (299). In Chen’s estimation, the American Century was in many ways an American-Pacific Century, and its network of relationships in the world’s largest ocean underscores the United States’ unfolding global commitments after World War II. Yet, conflict and competition between the United States’ regional allies complicated the Cold War era politics of maritime East Asia. Chen writes, “The competition between [regional and international actors] over their militaries, sovereignty, and local economic interests turned Cold War East Asia into a turbulent maritime order which, when interwoven with the stories on land, created an international history played out by international powers and local powers” (291–292).
