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26 September 2024

Introduction: Mapping China’s Strategic Space

Nadege Rolland

In September 1939, merely two weeks after Germany’s invasion of Poland, a group of leaders from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) met with Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith. The State Department’s policy planning capacity was nonexistent at the time, and CFR leaders offered to help the U.S. government prepare for the postwar world. Staunch internationalists, CFR members believed in greater U.S. involvement and leadership in world affairs, commensurate with the country’s growing economic power. With the State Department’s approval and the Rockefeller Foundation’s financial support, CFR officially launched a project named “Studies of American Interests in the War and the Peace,” aimed at examining the war’s effects on the United States and developing concrete proposals to safeguard U.S. interests once peace again prevailed. During the subsequent five years, several hundred U.S. leaders and experts from civil society, academia, business, and government, organized in five focused study groups, participated in over three hundred meetings and produced close to seven hundred reports dispatched to the State Department and the White House.1

In July 1941, CFR’s Economic and Financial Group completed a study introducing the concept of a “grand area” comprising most of the non-German world and including the “Western Hemisphere, the United Kingdom, the remainder of the British Commonwealth and Empire, the Dutch Indies, China and Japan.” 2 Based primarily on calculations of the need for continued U.S. access to export markets, as well as to raw materials and other products necessary to maintain a maximum defense effort, the definition of a quasi-global geographic sphere of U.S. interests also had military implications. As the report noted: “The United States should use its military power to protect the maximum possible area of the non-German world from control by Germany in order to maintain for its sphere of interest a superiority of economic power over that of the German sphere.” 3 In a world threatened by totalitarian mass conquest, the initial quest for sustained economic defense led U.S. planners to leap “from a hemispheric to a global mental map of U.S. interests and responsibilities,” a shift “which has proved enduring in the eight decades since.”4

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