Was Going to War with Japan a Good Idea?

No, this position is straight-forwardly radical. And foolishly ahistorical. For starters, it is not as if Pearl Harbor happened and then nothing else. Almost immediately following the attack on Hawaii, Japan launches full-scale attacks on US soldiers in the Philippines and throughout the Pacific – and attacks British and Dutch forces as well. So American citizens were quite literally dying, and American territory was quite literally being seized as the US government was declaring war. What peaceful alternative are you suggesting in the face of direct aggression?

Then of course would not having fought that empire have actually saved lives? Its doubtful, either in the short-run or the long-run. Japan massacred millions of civilians in China and other places it conquered, and it pressed hundreds of thousands more into the cruellest forms of slavery. So if no one resisted them then yes maybe some of the combatants would have been saved (and even some civilians who were collateral damage), but the consequence of that is leaving an incredibly ruthless conqueror in charge of half of Asia.

And that gets to the real problem here. If you aren’t willing to resist true naked aggression when it occurs then as a result you are leaving not just yourself but others open to suffering grave evils. The most basic rights of everyone are only protected because we make it dangerous for those people who set such rights at naught to violate them. Does this mean that we should jump into conflict all the time? Or that often it is better for people as a whole if the US gets involved in a conflict? No, it doesn’t. But, you critically weaken the case for restraint when you suggest that we should have kept aloof from one of the most obvious cases where intervention was beneficial.

Mr Levatter,

Sadly those two arguments are not really all that similar. Mr Higgs argues that the US provoked the Japanese attack with “economic warfare”. Mr Henderson makes the argument that the US should not have engaged in actual warfare after it was attacked at Pearl Harbor. I have little problem with the facts that Mr Higgs presents – the US clearly cut off oil sales to Japan well before Pearl Harbor (his interpretations of motives are more controversial). The implication of Mr Higgs’ piece is that we shouldn’t have taken action that would potentially provoke the Japanese government into violent action. I end up disagreeing with Mr Higgs on whether we should have taken those actions, but they are not what Mr Henderson is arguing.
Mr Henderson argues that the US should not have fought back against the people who were literally attacking and killing their soldiers; I don’t really get what he is suggesting that the US forces in the Philippines and on Guam and on Wake Island should have done, for example. They should have just surrendered? When this was the likely result: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March. And when things like this had already happened to other people conquered by Japanese armies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre. There comes a point where widespread, blatant aggression should be countered, and sadly that generally requires force. And the refusal to consider the actual situation that faced US policymakers and the country on December 8th, 1941 in favour of some hypothetical world where we could peacefully negotiate with a force that had just launched a major assault on the US and many of its allies is what I criticized as foolishly ahistorical.

I read the Higgs article you linked to, Ross. Quite frankly, I am baffled how anybody could think economic sanctions were inappropriate given what the Japanese Army was doing in Manchuria. Sure, doing so risks turning a regional conflict into a larger, global one, which it did, but the alternative is you allow the raw materials to continue to flow, feeding the Japanese warachine and allowing episodes like the rape of Nanking to continue and perhaps proliferate. Second guessing sanctions against a regime capable of such brutality strikes me as pure hindsight bias, arising solely from the fact that you and David (understandably) didn’t like what resulted.

One could make the same claim about all of the USA’s wars, from the revolution onward. Surely slavery would have extinguished in some way without the Civil War.

Yet, consider China, or Russia. We didn’t fight them, and they oppressed two generations and then dissolved to their current state. All those people who grew up in Russia or China in 1950-80 lived lives of miserable hypocrisy and servitude. Would it have been better to sacrifice 10M to prevent that? It’s not obvious. I certainly could think of no worse hell than living in a communist state.

I’m sorry, I find this whole proposition terrifyingly naive, especially from someone who advocates economic thinking.

Let us consider the proposal above: that Japan instead is made to pay $1,000,000,000 (1941).

How?

1941 Japan is the terror of the Pacific, laying waste to East Asia, slaughtering and enslaving millions with soldiers of mythical status. They have a strict view of honour and shame (note even office-workers’ hara-kiri suicides of the 1990s) and they have just obliterated half the Pacific fleet of their only real contender across the largest ocean on the planet.

What are you bringing to the table to force a humiliating surrender? That have already calculated that the US is ‘cheaper’ to eliminate as a threat by slaughtering Americans and starting a hot war than some cash; having achieved their aim of a US gov’t that is not going to fight back even without a hot war, what reason do they have to parlay?

As Japan, I’d have sent a few/all of your diplomats back in boxes to terrify your civilian population into psychological surrender. With such a weak-minded government, who’d miss the opportunity?

This post is a solid reminder about why Plato was so wrong about philosopher-kings, and that modern-day philosophers still haven’t taken the hint.

@Eric Falkenstein,
Yet, consider China, or Russia. We didn’t fight them, and they oppressed two generations and then dissolved to their current state. All those people who grew up in Russia or China in 1950-80 lived lives of miserable hypocrisy and servitude. Would it have been better to sacrifice 10M to prevent that? It’s not obvious. I certainly could think of no worse hell than living in a communist state.
Yes, Eric, let’s consider China and Russia. As I noted in my piece above:
“if the U.S. government’s concern was to keep the Chinese people from being ruled by a bloodthirsty government, it didn’t succeed: Chairman Mao saw to that”
Now Russia. I agree with you that Russia’s government, like China’s, was horrible. But then how do you advocate subsidizing Stalin? Or maybe you don’t. But most defenders of American’s participation in WWII whom I run into do defend FDR’s extensive support of Stalin.

From what I have read of the history, Japan’s medium-term objective was to carve out a chunk of the Pacific so as to give themselves a buffer from the United States. It’s not clear they would have pressed further east any time soon, not with 1940s military technology. In short, Japan had the same plans for the Pacific as the U.S.

As such, I think it is hard to defend the war on Japan as a way to defend U.S. interests in a short time horizon.

The longer-term argument is better, but it has inherent problems in that there are more different ways things can go. Would China have managed to mount a counter-attack on their own? If they continued to lose to Japan, would they have been worse off under Japan than under Mao? If Japan took over China but was then contained, how bad would that have been, exactly? None of these things are clear, but I could see it *probably* helped to beat back Japan.

Even then, you have to consider that we didn’t know we would succeed. If we had lost, Japan would probably have pressed its advantage, and we could have lost our homeland.

Another consideration is whether a counter-attack beyond the Pacific was worthwhile. Maybe we should have firmed up our outposts in the Pacific. Did we really need to totally defang and humiliate Japan, though? Up until the Manhattan project finally started working, the running plan was to land massive numbers of troops in Japan and physically depose the emperor. Overkill much?

Finally, it is worth considering the mood of the time. It was bad, and it was shameful. Americans overwhelmingly lept into a war founded on xenophobia. We broke all of our own rules, and we mistreated American citizens that had the wrong race. We rationed, and we manipulated our youth into dying on gory, maggoty hills.

We might have made the right decision, but we definitely made it the wrong way. We had a proud president, high unemployment, and a romanticized idea of war after decades of staying out of it. We went on an adventure, and we bled.

Another option would have been a limited response instead of total war with the demand for unconditional surrender.

The historian Butterfield, friends with CS Lewis, wrote that politicians need to be more humble because they can rarely achieve the outcomes they desire.

The US goaded Japan into attacking through trade sanctions, which have always been considered an act of war. Japan had no choice but to attack the US in response.

And as Dr Henderson shows, the Communist government did far more damage to Chinese than the Japanese ever dreamed of. Over 30 million Chinese starved to death in the 1960’s. And was Hitler worse for Eastern Europe than Stalin? Not by a long shot. The Allied victory left the world much worse off than if they had done nothing.

As Patton once said, we should have supported Germany against the USSR and kept the two fighting until they were totally exhausted.

I’m not an expert on the Pacific war, but two features of the situation as I understand it that are relevant to this discussion:

1. Japan was under severe time pressure because the U.S. embargo meant that unless it seized a source of oil (i.e. Dutch Indonesia), its supplies of oil would soon be insufficient to fight a naval war.

2. The Japanese military did not believe that Japan could win an all out war with the U.S. Their plan was to do well enough so that the U.S. would agree to a compromise peace. The quote I remember from one of the admirals was that they could manage a year of victories, hold the line for another year, and would then start losing.

Which suggests that we probably did have the option of negotiating a compromise peace not long after Pearl, whether or not it would have been a good idea.

One other point of interest. The Flying Tigers are now known to have been a U.S. government operation disguised as a private volunteer operation. If their movement into China had gone on schedule, they would have attacked the Japanese military in China before Pearl—without, of course, a declaration of war. So U.S. moral indignation, at least by the U.S. leadership, amounted to complaining that the Japanese had attacked us without a declaration of war before we got around to doing the same to them.

David, perhaps another 70 or so years will provide sufficient perspective to analyze this question.

Meanwhile remember Europe had a choice in 1938.

Also, recall Machiavelli’s observation that one puts off war only to their enemy’s advantage.

With regard to subsidizing Stalin, there were at least a few people then, and I would think now, who might have preferred if the US Army had kept marching after reaching Berlin.

Anyway, I’m not sure I can agree with this analysis. Yeah, economically war is a loser. In a world where all actors rationally analyze the situation and expect their counterparts to do the same, war would not occur because people would assess it in this way. But that isn’t the way the world works. That war occurs is the evidence for this itself.

The US government absolutely had a choice. So did the Japanese government. Having observed the Japanese government’s choice, why on Earth would one proceed in the above stated manner of trying to resolve the situation nonviolently?

Mr Levatter,

I believe that I have demonstrated that the two arguments (by Mr Higgs on the one hand and Mr Henderson on the other) are not in fact all that similar. Merely reasserting that a prominent historian asserts argument A does not make my criticism that argument B is “ahistorical” any less true. A reading of what I actually have written that was close enough to realize that the name is Kelley should have made that clear.

The new article you post is interesting but again irrelevant as others have already noted. Even if we buy the all of the arguments that Mr Higgs and Mr Gregory present, that still doesn’t make any case for why the US should have reacted the way Mr Henderson suggested after the attack on a key strategic asset and concurrent to continuing attacks on US soldiers, citizens and territory. That is what Mr Henderson failed to grapple with and that is what is ahistorical. The articles that you have supplied make the case that prior to the attacks that US leadership acted improperly. These simply are different issues.

You did take one of the most radical antiwar positions – turning the other cheek. But the sanctions we’d imposed on Japan were already serious warfare. It’s often argued that we expected the Dec 7 attack, and FDR may have welcomed it as an excuse to enter the much broader war already-in-progress. War in the Pacific was a decision that had already been taken – only the citizens and military were surprised. The next time you argue this, consider whether vis-a-vis the Russian communist threat of the 1930s, the US would have been better off cultivating Japan as an ally instead of the Chinese.
I was never clear on why we stood by just watching Japan’s hawks come to dominate their politics, and why we incited them even as late as 1944 with “unconditional surrender” terms that kept them from negotiating, but which in the end, we did not finally enforce, nor what we expected from befriending the troubled Chinese gov’t of the 1930s, which collapsed in 1949.

As a NZ citizen, and knowing what I do about Japanese atrocities, I’m very grateful that the Americans did defeat them.

And Roger McKinny – you sound terribly naive about the WWII Japanese. Of course the Japanese had a choice – they could have responded to the sanctions by withdrawing from China and the other occupied territories, thus stopping themselves from committing more atrocities against the locals. Deaths in China during WWII are estimated at between 10 and 20 million. Noticeably once the US forced Japan to be peaceful Japan took off economically.

A brief quibble with the premise:

“Going to war” was not an idea formulated by US authorities then in power (President & Congress).

In the Evolution of Civilizations, the last century was one of extensive conflict that might well represent the fragmentation or possible transition of Western Civilization, whose core had moved to North America and the US in particular.

The Japanese feudal culture, based on clan violence had begun entry into westernization in the first decade of that last century. Its initial efforts at expansion were successful at modest costs and without essential alteration of that basic feudal culture and its sustaining force. It would come to represent a form of Westernization regarded in that culture as “modernization.”

The viewpoint of an “idea” as discussed initially does not consider the Clausewitz thesis or any of its modern refinements.

The concept of war, as hostilities and violence between nation-states that were the roiling conflicts of the last century differed from the hostilities undertaken for the expansion of the Japanese feudal culture in its westernization and modification of Western Civilization – based on superiority in human to human violence. That expansion of the Japanese feudal system was of course an idea formed by the consensus of the dominant clans (who are still highly influential in Japanese culture).

The reactions to the various expressions of the expansion of the Japanese feudal system and its incongruent uses of violence will probably be seen historically as part of the spontaneous reordering of Western Civilization to eliminate a possible intrusion of the permanent influence of a violent feudal culture in the shaping of the future of that civilization as it fragments or transitions.

It was therefore essential that the possibility of future and continuing influence of a violent feudal culture in the shaping of Western Civilization be not only suppressed, but totally eliminated. Otherwise the epoch of conflicts which continued past the halfway mark of the last century would be continuing on into this century.

Those dominant clans appear to have adopted a new and evolving consensus which may even affect the degree of their continuing dominance: as well as the manner in which that dominance is exercised.

While the reaction to the attempts at Japanese feudal expansion was not an idea, it was an essential and good reaction.

Having read all of the comments, it seems that this audience is the polar opposite of the one in the original story.

I’m referring to this part:

Interestingly, no one argued with me, possibly because they didn’t have a good argument or possibly because they wanted to discuss other things.

For it seems that all the comments here only want to argue if the war was inevitable or not. I hope this is due to the writers considering the existence of the actual choice obvious. In my opinion that is the actual point of the story.

Topias:

Maybe the point essayed is that different participants in what comes to be “war” are affected by differing forces and factors that cause their participation.

@Greg Jaxon-

why we incited them even as late as 1944 with “unconditional surrender” terms that kept them from negotiating

Unconditional surrender was Allied policy, although it was only grudgingly agreed to by Churchill and Stalin (imagine that, Stalin opposed demanding unconditional surrender by the Nazis? This surprised me, too!)

Either way, the policy seems to have been FDR’s idea, and his alone. Much of the US military disagreed with it. I believe I read somewhere once that MacArthur would have accepted a conditional surrender from the Japanese, if he had been allowed to.

The comments by Ross are interesting but are irrelevant to Mr Henderson’s point – once the Japanese attacked what should the U.S. response have been? Did U.S. diplomacy contribute to Japan’s decision to attack? Yes, but so what.

Isn’t that apparent dilemma exactly what those who want war tend to set up and impose?

Why not grab the bull by the horns and insist on an explanation from FDR what he thought he was doing?

At a Nov. 25 [1941] meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

How we got into WWII is a lot more interesting than anyone posting here seems to realize. We deliberately provoked Japan into attacking us at the behest of Stalin’s secret service. The memo that delivered an ultimatum to Japan was authored by Harry Dexter White operating under the orders of the Russian KGB operative Vitaly Pavlov. It was known to the Russians as Operation Snow.