As the United States enters the twenty-first century, it confronts
two powers that loomed less large on the world stage a century
before. Yet American policies toward Russia and China have been
shaped by attitudes going back even further, as this new book
relates.
"Distorted Mirrors" traces American prejudices toward the two
countries by focusing on the views of influential writers and
politicians over the course of the twentieth century. Donald Davis
and Eugene Trani show where American images of Russia and China
originated, how they evolved, and how they have often helped
sustain foreign policies generally negative toward the former and
positive toward the latter.
This wide-ranging survey draws on memoirs, archives, and
interviews, much the material appearing in print for the first
time, to show how influential individuals shaped these perceptions
and policies based on what they saw--or thought they saw--in those
two countries. Through a series of tableaux that traces America's
relations with Russia and China through the twentieth century, the
authors show how personalities of certain players impacted
interpretation of key situations and conflicts and how cultural
attitudes toward Russia and China became ingrained and difficult to
dislodge.
The book traces formative attitudes back to two
late-nineteenth-century books, with George Kennan's "Siberia and
the Exile System" painting a grim picture of tsarist penal colonies
and William Rockhill's "Land of the Lamas" depicting China as an
exotic Shangri-la. Davis and Trani show how these images were
sustained over the years: for Russia, by Slavic expert Samuel
Harper, State Department official Robert Kelley, journalist Eugene
Lyons, ambassador William Bullitt, President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
and policymakers George F. Kennan and Paul Nitze; and for China, by
President Woodrow Wilson, philosopher John Dewey, journalist Edgar
Snow, novelist Pearl S. Buck, ambassador Nelson T. Johnson, FDR,
journalist Theodore White, and statesman Henry Kissinger. They also
relate how Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush tried to replace
these misconceptions with a policy of accommodation, and they
assess the state of current U.S. attitudes and policies.
"Distorted Mirrors" marks a fresh approach to U.S. relations
with these countries, emphasizing long-term attitudes that
influenced policies rather than the reverse. It shows us that
perceptions shaped over the course of the twentieth century are
crucial for their bearing on the twenty-first, particularly if
those unrestrained prejudices reemerge.
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