George Will:

In May 1900, America’s 25th president, William McKinley, sent U.S. troops to China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion. America’s 33rd president, Harry Truman, waged serious war in Asia — in Korea, where Americans suffered 157,530 casualties, including 54,246 fatalities. Dwight Eisenhower vowed, during the 1952 campaign, “I shall go to Korea,” which Americans correctly heard as a vow to end the war one way or another.

In December of that year the president-elect did something no serving president had ever done: He set foot on the far side of the Pacific. America’s 38th president, Gerald Ford, was the first to visit Japan while in office. (President Ulysses S. Grant visited Japan after leaving office, and is said to have been the first person to shake the emperor’s hand. America’s First Pacific President bowed.)

President Taft’s predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, sort of earned — imagine that — his Nobel Peace Prize for helping to mediate the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. (The mediation occurred in Portsmouth, N.H.; TR did not attend.) In October 1908, the “Great White Fleet” that TR sent around the world as an act of national exuberance arrived in Japan, where U.S. officers were housed in the emperor’s palace.

In order to encourage Japan, then an almost hermetically sealed society, to play nicely with others, in March 1852 America’s 13th president, Millard Fillmore, ordered Commodore Matthew Perry to go to Tokyo with the U.S. Navy’s East India Squadron, which had first been dispatched across the Pacific in 1835 by America’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson. Perry’s 1853 visit to Tokyo Bay was not persuasive, so he returned in 1854 — by then his commander in chief was America’s 14th president, Franklin Pierce — with a larger fleet. The spectacle of what the Japanese called the “black ships” moved them to sign a treaty of “permanent” friendship, which became impermanent at 7:49 a.m., Dec. 7, 1941.

The first U.S. treaty with China was signed in 1844 under the 10th president, John Tyler. Pacific waves have lapped the republic’s shores since California attained statehood in September 1850. The 11th president, James Polk, had wrested California from Mexico, and the 12th president, Zachary Taylor, died before statehood came under Fillmore.

And yet we have to put up with nonsense like this.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 6:37 am and is filed under China, Democrats, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.