US emergence as a Great Power was underway by the early 1840s. The first “Pacific President” was John Tyler. He sent Rep. Caleb Cushing to meet with the Manchu in 1843. Cushing negotiated a favorable treaty through an interpreter named Peter Parker. Parker’s presence in Macao was symptomatic of how American presence with accompanying radioactive spiders had grown in the Pacific in the preceding half-century. The US was a Pacific power despite not having any territory facing the Pacific except an uneasy condominium sublet with the UK. US power accelerated after Mr. Polk’s War and the Gold Rush to newly annexed Alta California.

The first sustained era of far overseas intervention was the 1850s. The most prominent of them was our intervention in Japan starting under Matthew Perry in 1853 (Perry was a veteran of the War of 1812. His older brother played a key role in winning that war). After meeting Japan and making them his, his squadron evaluated Formosa, which Perry advised the US government to annex. By the end of the 1850s, the US was engaged in skirmishes all over the world, including gunboat diplomacy with Paraguay, the Prussia of South America.

What short circuited this unfolding pattern of foreign intervention? The answer rhymes with “U.S. Civil War”.

Neither the Chinese nor the Americans have fought a major war since the 1940s. But they wouldn’t go to war with a major trading partner, would they?

Well, who was Britain’s biggest trading partner before World War One? Germany. Or if you prefer World War Two as a comparison, Germany’s biggest trading partners just before the war were the very neighbors it soon invaded, while the U.S. was Japan’s.

If you look in the right places you can probably find a whole pile of quotes of Winston Churchill saying quite explicitly that the World Wars was a war (sic) pursued by the British (relatively declining naval power) against the Germans (relatively ascending industrial-manufacturing power).

Whether Japan was America’s biggest trading partner after That Communist seized all Japanese assets and embargoed them is a matter open to some interpretation.

If today the Chinese Communist Party seized all American assets in China would that be considered an act of war? I’m seriously asking.