Think tanks have got "pivot" to Asia wrong

In the minds of former US government officials and policy academics who populate Washington think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Asia before the arrival of the East India Company's taipans and Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" was devoid of an accepted, or acceptable, international order. China, Korea, Japan and the rest of the region were backward and incapable of sophisticated engagement with each other, or with the outside world.

Only the West, especially, after World War II (a cataclysm proving the region's incapacity for harmonious peaceful co-existence), the United States, that has provided the region a loadstone capable of ordering, uplifting and pacifying its fractious, benighted nationalities.

History has bestowed upon the US a civilizing mission, informed by a variant of Sun Yat-sen's notion of "political tutelage", to recreate Asian civil societies in liberal Western modes, while US military power must be permanently imbedded in the region to suppress latent Asian barbarism.