The Competence Ceiling: Admiration, Affection, and Racial Hierarchy in U.S. Alliance Discourse, 1945–1965

Within a decade of total war, U.S. officials spoke of Japan with admiration and of Korea with sympathy, yet treated neither as an equal. This paper argues that postwar U.S. discourse did not abandon racial hierarchy but reorganized it along two axes from the Stereotype Content Model: warmth and competence. Coding 350 passages from the Roger Nash Baldwin papers, National Archives records, and the Foreign Relations of the United States series (1940–1965), I find that Japan moved from cold-competent threat to warm-competent partner by 1945–47, while Korea remained warm but incompetent throughout. Japan drew praise for discipline and verbs of agency; Korea drew pity and verbs of dependency. Conditional language, the most frequent category, made partnership contingent on compliance, and aid followed suit: catalytic for Japan, recursive for Korea. Racial hierarchy, the paper concludes, operates not only by setting a floor through dehumanization but by setting a ceiling through praise.