Pearl Harbor, once more

Since I occasionally make cryptic, sniping remarks about Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, I should make clear that there are at least a few things in the book that I find  illuminating. One of them is his discussion of the situation that Japan faced in 1941. (Btw, the prompt for this post is a discussion about Pearl Harbor on an LGM thread that started off being about the Russo-Japanese war.)

He notes that in mid-1941 the U.S. applied a "full-scale embargo" against Japan, "emphasizing...that it could avoid economic strangulation only by abandoning China, Indochina, and maybe Manchuria." (p.223) The U.S. was determined that Japan should not dominate Asia or be in a position to strike the USSR, then on the ropes against Hitler's invasion. This left Japan with two bad, from its perspective, choices: "cave in to American pressure and accept a significant diminution of its power, or go to war against the United States, even though an American victory was widely agreed to be the likely outcome." (ibid.) The Japanese chose the latter course, he goes on to say, as the less bad of two very bad alternatives. That does not mean the decision was irrational, though it was an extremely "risky gamble" (ibid., 224).

Where I would part company (or so I assume) with Mearsheimer is in seeing the entire Japanese militarist-imperialist enterprise as irrational -- and also immoral and criminal -- from the outset. However, given that Japan's leaders at the time were committed to that enterprise and given the particular circumstances that they faced, their decision to go to war with the U.S. was not 'irrational'. Whether the specific decision to attack Pearl Harbor was a mistake is really a secondary question; the more basic question has to do with the decision to launch war against the U.S.

ETA: And it's the more basic questions that tend to get shunted aside or overlooked when discussions focus narrowly on specific strategic decisions.

2nd update: Googling "sagan origins of the pacific war" brings up results, including Scott Sagan's 1988 article that M. cites (although my browser didn't like the pdf) and a 2010 paper at academia.edu by a UCLA grad student ("Revisiting the Origins of the Pacific War") that appears, on a quick glance, to take M.'s view, more or less. (But I've already conceded in the comments that TBA could be right.)

3rd update: For a somewhat different take on this, see John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday (1989), pp.229-30.

Dower on the atomic bombings

We've been talking about, among other things, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and here's a passage from John W. Dower's Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (Norton/New Press, pb, 2011) in which he lists a number of (to use an inappropriately antiseptic word) factors:

It is possible to see a terrible logic in the use of the bombs that is unique to the circumstances of that moment and at the same time not peculiar at all. This logic still begins with (1) ending the war and saving American lives. It no longer ends there, however, but extends to additional considerations, including the following: (2) fixation on deploying overwhelming force, as opposed to diplomatic or other less destructive alternatives including, most controversially, an unwillingness to back off from demanding Japan's unconditional surrender; (3) power politics in the emerging Cold War, notably playing the new weapon as a "master card," as Stimson put it, to intimidate the Soviet Union in eastern Europe as well as Asia; (4) domestic political considerations, in which using the bomb was deemed necessary to prevent partisan post-hostilities attacks on Truman...for wasting taxpayers' money on a useless project -- and simultaneously to build support for postwar nuclear and military projects; (5) scientific "sweetness" and technological imperatives -- coupled with (6) the technocratic kinetics of an enormous machinery of war -- which combined to give both developing and deploying new weaponry a vigorous life of its own; (7) the sheer exhilaration and aestheticism of unrestrained violence, phenomena not peculiar to modern times but peculiarly compelling in an age of spectacular destructiveness; (8) revenge, in this instance exacted collectively on an entire population in retaliation for Pearl Harbor and Japan's wartime atrocities; and (9) "idealistic annihilation," whereby demonstrating the appalling destructiveness of an atomic bomb on real, human targets was rationalized as essential to preventing future war, or at the very least future nuclear war. (p.223)    

What caused Japan to surrender in 1945?

It wasn't the atomic bomb, Ward Wilson argues.

Islands in the storm

One of the more significant quotes in this WaPo piece about the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute is buried at the end: the Japanese professor saying there's no possibility of a major war between China and Japan.

Japan-India trade & nuclear energy deal

Here.

NIMBY, Okinawa version

"The [Japanese] government is...struggling to decide how to implement an agreement with the US to move a Marine air base to a new site on the southern island of Okinawa. Opposition to the deal was underscored when voters in the area that is the proposed new site [of the base] backed opponents of the deal in a local election on Sunday."

-- from a recent article in the FT

An unwarranted assumption

A front-page piece in Wednesday's NYT discussing the possible consequences for U.S.-Japan relations of the Democratic Party of Japan's election victory (Mark Landler and Martin Fackler, "U.S. Is Seeing Policy Thorns in Japan Shift," NYT, 9/2/09, p.A1, continued p.A10) contains this passage:

"[Incoming P.M. Yukio] Hatoyama's views [as expressed in an excerpted article from a Japanese journal that appeared in English translation recently on the NYT website] sent many in Washington's diplomatic establishment scurrying to learn more about him and the Democrats. That highlighted a problem: While American officials and academics have spent decades cultivating close ties with the Liberal Democrats, who have governed Japan for most of the last half century, they have built few links to the opposition."

And whose fault is that? Surely it wasn't prudent to assume that the Liberal Democrats would be in power in Japan forever.

On the Great Powers

Nick at Worlds Apart has two thoughtful posts on great powers in the early 21st century. Reading these posts reminded me that there is no consensus among scholars about exactly how to define 'great power' or exactly which states count as great powers. To a large extent, however, the disagreements are probably more terminological than real.

Nick argues for three categories: 'global great power' (a category currently occupied only by the U.S.), 'regional great powers,' and 'global middle powers'. To be a 'global great power', he says, a state must meet five criteria: 1) dominate its region; 2) have a first-class military, including secure nuclear second strike capability, and an economy to support the military establishment; 3) wield 'soft power'; 4) have a political system that major domestic actors see as legitimate; and 5) be recognized as a great power by other states, as reflected in holding key positions in international institutions. Of these criteria, the only one I might quarrel with is number 4, though I would not want to press the point too hard. Two of these criteria, numbers 3 and 5, suggest that being a 'global great power' requires a certain amount of prestige. Prestige is itself a contested concept and there is disagreement about whether and how states compete for it (whatever 'it' is, exactly).

So, who counts as a regional great power, to use Nick's phrase? I would say China, India, the EU, Japan, and Russia. These five plus the U.S. account for a bit more than half the world's population, three-quarters of global GDP, and 80 percent of defense spending (R. Haass, "The Age of Nonpolarity," For. Aff., May/June '08, p.45). Of these five, China and India are 'rising powers,' while the positions/trajectories of the EU, Japan, and Russia are more uncertain.

There is one other aspect of the great power role that deserves mention: great powers have, or traditionally have been thought to have, special rights and responsibilities with respect to the maintenance of international peace and security (H. Bull, The Anarchical Society, p.202). Several of the great powers arguably have not been discharging these responsibilities as they should in recent years. The U.S. invasion of Iraq; China's actions in Sudan/Darfur and Tibet and Xinjiang; Russia's war with Georgia -- while these are not 'equivalent,' and while the rights and wrongs of each particular case can be argued, it does seem to be time for the great powers to reacquaint themselves with what one writer (R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.173) calls "the moral significance of what is involved in being a great power."

Slightly-off-the-beaten-path news

A couple of items:
1) The Japanese p.m. has decided not to go to Yasukuni shrine to mark the 63rd anniversary of Japan's defeat in WW2. (A few members of his cabinet did go to the shrine, however.) The decision is seen as part of his effort to mend fences with neighbors who were ruffled by his predecessor Koizumi's shrine visits (among other things). See here.

2) Complying, six years late, with a 2002 decision of the International Court of Justice in the Hague (a/k/a the World Court), Nigeria handed the Bakassi peninsula over to Cameroon. The peninsula, which juts into the Gulf of Guinea, has oil reserves, though activities by several armed groups in the region may prevent Cameroon from getting the oil out. See here.

Lingering scars of World War II

Japan has decided not to use a C-130 military transport plane to send relief supplies to the China quake victims. It's going to use a chartered civilian plane instead. This would have been the first military flight by Japan into Chinese airspace since the end of World War II, and it evidently was a psychological bridge too far for the Chinese government. You can read the BBC article here.