BEYOND VIETNAM: The United States and Asia

As a committed Asian scholar and practitioner, Harvard's Reischauer is on a plateau all his own. With four decades of teaching Asian matters behind him, with twenty-four years of residence in the area, with five years as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, and even with a Japanese wife, Reischauer well deserves an alert audience for this thoughtful book. Rising as a critic of contemporary American policy, he writes of more than this nation's involvement in Vietnam. Scoring Western ethnocentrism that uses European models to illustrate Asian policy, the author points to the amazing diversity of the area and the need for different guidelines for each of the nations involved. He cites imbalance and myopia as one of the highest costs that has been paid in Vietnam--the neglect of crucial long-term trends in favor of a simplistic policy of containment. Nowhere does he anticipate a victory of unitary Communism but contends that what we will see is a multiplicity of variants of nationalism creating their own national styles. The chapter on japanese developments couldn't be better and his recognition of the field magnetism of China's trade potential and the Asian balance-of-power schema may be one of the important components in this important book.