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| Douglas MacArthur (Wiki Info - Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Francis P. Sempa
The controversial general would have applauded the U.S. commitment to the Asia-Pacific.
Douglas MacArthur is known as a brilliant and controversial general, but not as a geopolitical visionary. Throughout his lengthy and distinguished military career, however, MacArthur envisioned geopolitical factors that he believed would result in a U.S. pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.
In April 1904, shortly after MacArthur graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, he accompanied his father, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur, Jr., on an official tour of Asia. General Arthur MacArthur, who won the Medal of Honor as a 19-year-old lieutenant in the Union Army during the American Civil War and who had commanded U.S. forces in putting down the Philippine insurrection, was in Japan to observe the Russo-Japanese War. Douglas recalled in his memoirs,Reminiscences, that he and his father traveled from Japan to Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Calcutta, Peshwar, Quetta, Bombay, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Madras, Colombo, Java, Siam, Indochina, and Shanghai. “We were nine months in travel,” MacArthur wrote, “traversing countless miles of lands so rich in color, so fabled in legend, so vital to history that the experience was without doubt the most important factor of preparation in my entire life.” He continued:
The true historic significance and the sense of destiny that these lands of the western Pacific and Indian Ocean now assumed became part of me. They were to color and influence all the days of my life. Here lived almost half the population of the world, with probably more than half of the raw products to sustain future generations. Here was western civilization’s last earth frontier. It was crystal clear to me that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts.
Read the full story at The Diplomat