[Sorry for the TLDR, but the crux of the debate is straightforwardly expressed in the thread title.]
In his paper “Pearl Harbor: Military Inconvenience, Political Disaster,” Ohio State political science professor John S. Mueller makes the argument(requires JSTOR) that the U.S. should have responded to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with a policy of cold war rather than hot–that is,
Mueller notes that unlike Germany, which could not be contained because it possessed the will and capacity to invade France, “Japan could not invade and defeat the United States.” Moreover, Japan–unlike Germany–was at that time bogged down in a costly continental war in China, which provided fertile opportunity for a policy of harassment.
Mueller notes that the policy of containment worked against the Soviet Union; and that, although a cataclysmic hot war might have sped up the process of the dissolution of the USSR, few people think such a conflict would have been worthwhile.
Would such a policy have worked against Japan? Mueller thinks so:
- The Japanese were vastly overextended and bogged down by their intervention in China, which they could not possibly win
- By 1941, military spending had soared to 38% of Japanese economic output, the country couldn’t import needed raw materials to keep up with military production, and was running into labor shortages
- Despite gains in Southeast Asia (including some important oil fields in the Dutch East Indies), the Japanese inspired such hatred among conquered peoples to guarantee enormous occupation costs
- Prewar studies showed that even with access to conquered oil fields, the Japanese would face a major oil crisis within a few years due to the inadequacy of those resources and Japan’s inability to effectively exploit them (lack of tanker fleet, not enough time to get fields into production)
- Japan had a grossly inadequate merchant fleet, making it especially vulnerable to economic containment
- In terms of domestic politics, there were elements among the senior leadership that weren’t totally on board with Japan’s militaristic direction (including the Emperor); quite possibly with time to let Japan’s ill-advised policies play out, moderate voices would have become ascendant.
In short, Japan was a more auspicious target for a containment policy than the Soviet Union.
What about the gains of the Pacific War? Mueller finds these questionable. Gaining a strong democratic ally in the new Japan “can, I suppose, be accounted a gain, but it cannot be entirely irrelevant to point out that in order to achieve the liberalization of Japan it was necessary to depopulate the country by some two million souls” [to say nothing of American lives lost]. Nor was postwar Asia particularly stable or peaceful simply on account of knocking out imperial Japan. “Rather, it was the scene of bloody civil and international war, economic and social mismanagement often of spectacular proportions, and occasionally outright genocide.”
As for what Mueller agrees may have been the biggest single cause of the war, Japan’s occupation of China, Mueller thinks it unlikely that China could have been much worse off in Japanese hands even if containment had not forced a Japanese withdrawal:
To sum up:
- The attack on Pearl Harbor was an incredibly lucky and well-landed blow by the Japanese, but not a harbinger of invasion of the United States. The US was unprepared for Pearl Harbor per se but exceeded Japan in overall industrial capability by almost comical proportions, and the Japanese posed virtually no threat to the US homeland.
- Japan was in fairly desperate straits at the time of the attack, a situation that only worsened thereafter
- The end of the Japanese empire could have been brought about at much lower cost to the United States through a more patient policy of aggressive containment
- Had such a policy failed, it’s not clear that Asia in general, and China in particular, would have been much worse off than they were in the actual postwar 20th century
- In any event, it is questionable whether the US gains in the region merited the enormous loss of life and treasure on our side (to say nothing of the collateral damage to the region and to the Japanese people)
Granting that hindsight is 20/20 and that the proposed containment policy may well have been politically unthinkable in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, what say you, O ye students of WWII and military history? Is the good doctor onto something here or is he full of shit?