This landmark two-volume set comprehensively examines the role, influence and contributions of American and European military power and statecraft in shaping the state system and regional order in modern Asia across the 20th century. From the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 to the close of the 1970s, Western Military Power and the Reordering of Modern Asia, 1900-1979 explains how strategic foreign policy in the West was used to politically reorder the modern 'Far East', an arc of space stretching from Vladivostok to Burma – referred to here as the Asia Pacific.

The volumes pay particularly close attention to the major international 'visions' for restructuring an Asian states system within a changing, increasingly global, political order set forth in the period:

* The peace treaties of 1919 and the League of Nations
* The United Nations vision of 1945
* The Geneva Agreements of 1954

Concentrating on three key themes – notions of global order, concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy, and projects for collective security – and bearing in mind the centrality of China and Japan, Brian P. Farrell and his international author team explain why and how these visions, and the power deployed to pursue them, contributed fundamentally to the construction of a post-imperial Asia Pacific; the region's new state system hard-coded into a now global political order.