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This article examines U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s Cold War dissent as a window into racial geopolitics in a post–World War II era of decolonization and U.S. global power. Focused on Wallace and the United States, the article uses a wide range of published and archival sources to argue that Wallace and U.S. anticolonial liberal elites saw anti-racist egalitarian pressures in the post-1945 international system as not only a threat, as existing scholarship suggests, but also an opportunity for U.S. global expansion—particularly in the Pacific Rim. By the 1960s, Wallace and postwar anti-racist activists diminished in influence amid global Cold War pressures reviving racial restrictions and Cold War militarization after the Korean War. Nonetheless, Wallace’s anti-racist diplomacy, stemming from long-running U.S. and global liberal debates and political struggles over race and empire, suggests the wider role of anti-racist geopolitics and the paradoxical persistence of race as a global cultural concept in the postwar era.

The emergence of Japan as a major world power in the early twentieth century generated anxiety over America’s place in the world. Fears of race suicide combined with a fear of the feminizing effects of over-civilization further exacerbated these tensions. Japanese jiu-jitsu came to symbolize these debates. As a physical example of the yellow peril, Japanese martial arts posed a threat to western martial arts of boxing and wrestling. The efficiency and effectiveness of Japanese jiu-jitsu, as introduced to Americans in the early twentieth century, challenged preconceived notions of the superiority of western martial arts and therefore American constructions of race and masculinity. As Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. nation wrestled with the Japanese and jiu-jitsu, they responded in various ways to this new menace. The jiu-jitsu threat was ultimately subjugated by simultaneously exoticizing, feminizing, and appropriating aspects of it in order to reassert the dominance of western martial arts, the white race and American masculinity.

To what extent did U.S. intelligence believe that Imperial Japanese forces would invade the West Coast, an idea that many believe was responsible for the alleged atmosphere of wartime hysteria that led to mass confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans? Based on unused archival materials, this article shows that these agencies dismissed the idea of an impending Japanese invasion, shown by their negative reaction to Korean nationalist Kilsoo Haan’s “Yellow Peril” prediction of a Japanese invasion of California in 1943. It also demonstrates that assumptions about Yellow Peril ideas require more nuanced analysis, for they were not universally accepted or as widespread as often believed. The article concludes with observations on Kilsoo Haan, U.S. intelligence, and Japanese American internment.

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.

This article examines the intersections of race, nationalism, and water conservation policy. Such relationships, it argues, are particularly pronounced in the history of the Colorado River Delta, a border region and an arid region, especially in the discourse surrounding the international allocation of the river. It focuses on the intellectual underpinnings of federal reclamation leaders and their subscription to the tenets of the idea of "yellow peril," with special reference to Chinese and Japanese immigrant farmers along the U.S.-Mexican border. While the reclamation movement has received considerable scrutiny, the geopolitical views informing it have been largely overlooked. The unexamined writings of George Maxwell, in particular, present a new perspective on the major architect of the National Reclamation Act, one of the region's most far-reaching and consequential pieces of legislation.

This article examines the history of Asian migration and exclusion in the Americas by focusing on the intersections of national histories, transnational migration, and the globality of race. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a transnational conversation about race, migration, and national security circulated throughout North and South America. The subject was the global migration of Asians and the alleged threat they posed. By examining the circularity of Asian migration within the Americas as well as the transnational nature of anti-Asian racism, this article seeks to revise our understandings of transnationalism and contribute to the larger global history of race.