National Security Agency director Robert O’Brien, 2020
U.S. fantasies of expansion, commercial dominion, and military prowess have long hinged on a premise of Pacific exceptionalism. Couched in the millenarian language of manifest destiny, the Pacific region and its multitudinous ecosystems, cultures, peoples, and nations have been vacated in favor of an
aqua nullius that frames the region as an empty space designated for U.S. possession by divine providence.
This manufactured Pacific
idea what David Palumbo-Liu describes as a “repository of the American imaginary” has borne many names.
3 Amid the nineteenth-century annexation of Hawai‘i and the colonization of the Philippines, politician Whitelaw Reid heralded the ultimate conversion of the Pacific into an “American Lake.”