How should the United States have responded to Pearl Harbor?

Great Debates
81

[QUOTE=Lemmytheseal2]
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. A British economist named Hobson published a book called Imperialism, written and researched while the Empire was at its height, in which he demonstrated how empires create a net loss for those who hold them (or, to be precise, those who are tasked with paying for and defending them). He was right, along with the rest of the original “Little Englanders.” They were considered gadflies at best, but they ended up being quite correct. It was true for the British and the French, but at least they managed to walk away from their empires before they were dragged down by them. The Portuguese tried to hang on even longer, but their own military got sick of it, came home from Africa, and overthrew the government. The Soviets, in contrast, did get dragged down. The USSR’s influence expanded after the Vietnam War, and they promptly went broke.
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The British Empire lasted over 300 years, much of which they were the dominant super power. There were several versions of the French Empire, but their colonial empire lasted for well over a hundred years, during which they were also one of the major super powers. The Portuguese empire lasted nearly 500 years. The Soviets, who always were an empire by any definition lasted over 70 years, during which they also were one of the major super powers. All of these nations were more powerful economically and politically as empires than they were when they were as England, France, Portugal and Russia (or even the old Russian empire under the Tsar’s). A Japanese empire would have basically been the same thing. They would have been much, much more powerful than Japan was alone. They might not have lasted all that long, but while they did they would have dominated Asia and the Pacific.

Ah, because that would have been something I would have expected him to say as well. Guess you guys are just on the same wavelength or something.

82

Presentism applied to the past.

83

So all we have to do is find some small corner of Russia that is majority Latvian and we’re cool to start a proxy war on Russia soil. Right? Let’s not forget that the Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union and was allowed to leave. Putin obviously disagrees with that decision and would like to undo it. And it doesn’t matter how many Ukrainians get in the way.

“No Hitler” my ass. That’s exactly what he is.

84

[QUOTE=Lemmytheseal2]
Not so. The people of Crimea and some other nearby areas are more Russian than they are Ukrainian, and that has become particularly relevant recently, since the government in Kiev was toppled and replaced with a reactionary regime including some fascist elements.
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Well, that is certainly one way to spin things…a way that Putin would approve of whole heartedly I’m sure. :stuck_out_tongue:

But you haven’t noticed all of the anti-US anti-western rhetoric coming out of Moscow, right? Or the cold war actions that Russia is doing, as opposed to mere rhetoric…right? Hell, what’s the point of this ridiculous hijack, when it has nothing to do with the threads topic? If you want to blow up Putin, go to one of those threads and gush to your little hearts content.

85

Stopping the Holocaust?

86

And for the privilege of being “super powers”, they had to sink unimaginable sums of blood and treasure into these empires, which doomed them all in the end, to greater and lesser degrees. Expansion also increases the likelihood of having a border conflict with somebody else’s country and/or empire, and that’s actually a big part of what happened to the Japanese Empire, with fatal results.

Seeing empire as a source of strength looks like a case of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy to me. Countries don’t necessarily get stronger by drawing resources from their empires; as Hobson demonstrated, it usually costs more to maintain said empires. The idea of a Japanese Empire becoming so large and efficient at extracting resources that it became powerful enough to pose an existential threat to the United States is highly dubious.

In contrast, there are some countries that avoided playing the imperial game, or who were only involved briefly, and avoided the calamity that ensued. That also goes for countries that were lucky/skillful enough to have little or no experience as being part of somebody else’s empire. They tended to be pretty hardy.

Along with lots of military men and scientists who had first-hand experience with that awful thing.

87

Are you serious? Hitler? If there are any Nazis in this equation, they’re in power in Kiev, and occasionally getting themselves killed fighting in the east. That fascist coup regime is definitely not worth risking a wider war over.

It happens to be true.

I have noticed the rhetoric, and if it was accompanied by actions equivalent to what the NED and other NGOs were up to in Russia’s near abroad, and in Russia itself, I would definitely have a problem with it. Would Americans tolerate foreign GONGOs influencing elections (or worse) in the US? Of course not.

I only brought it up because Scumpup was spreading fears about how Russia is allegedly once again aggressive today, apparently because they were never occupied like Japan and Germany. Incidentally, Germany has indeed acted aggressively since WW2 and since reunification, when German forces participated in the war against Yugoslavia in 1999. There are also some bad, bad people on the Japanese Right, who would love to see the (quite strong) SDF changed into a force with offensive capabilities.

Also, I don’t want to “blow up” Putin, obviously.

That was mostly the work of the Soviets, and it wasn’t really one of the top war goals of any of the Allies.

88

Do I think SOMEONE should fight and die to prevent the Holocaust? Of course. But my litmus test in these matters is, “Would I be willing to die horribly or send my son to die horribly for this cause?” And there, the honest answer is, probably not unless it threatened to directly affect me and my family. The same reason the US has generally not committed soldiers to preventing genocide (eg Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq today).

And as pointed out upthread, stopping the Holocaust was a side effect (a most wonderful one to be sure) of our involvement in the war, not the motivating factor.

89

The OP (and Pr Mueller if his views are being represented accurately) seemed to be making an unwarranted assumption that Japan was doomed to defeat.

The Japanese weren’t stupid. They were aware their country was resource poor and vulnerable to economic warfare.

And that’s exactly what they were trying to fix by going to war. They wanted to conquer resource rich territory in Eastern Asia so they would become a stronger power.

If we had tried to “contain” Japan rather than fighting them by conventional means, we would have seen Japan getting stronger every month instead of weaker.

90

Well there’s some honour in your honesty, not much for the actual sentiment you express. But that’s cool. If everyone stood up for other people I probably couldn’t get 2 dozen tube socks for 5 dollars. So thanks.

91

The Japanese leadership was acting under an incorrect assumption that they would get stronger due to expansion, and it ended up destroying them. They were running into serious problems even before they attacked Pearl Harbor (and Guam, the Philippines, and Kiska & Attu). That doesn’t mean that Mueller’s minimalist response (I didn’t read the paper) is at all realistic, since plenty of American citizens on American territory were under attack and then under occupation, but in no way could the mainland ever be seriously threatened.

I’m sympathetic to parts of the OP/Mueller’s argument, but only parts of it. There’s a weird phenomenon going on in this thread where his argument is being opposed for the wrong reasons, which rest on the same fallacies that governments everywhere, especially the Japanese, were foolish enough to hold.

92

[QUOTE=Lemmytheseal2]
It happens to be true.
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No, it’s not really. It’s revisionist bullshit.

Then we should probably drop it and save that debate for a thread appropriate for it…one of which I believe you participated in a few months ago if I recall correctly. Regardless, this isn’t the place for your spin on Russia or Putin’s motives for their recent land grab.

Much more on topic, even if I disagree with your assessment, which seems to be more driven by your ideology and antipathy towards empire than realism. Japan might have eventually fallen had they achieved empire, going down in blood and fire (in fact, I have no doubt that would have been their eventual fate), but it wasn’t going to happen any time soon if the US hadn’t opposed them in the Pacific. They were certainly running into issues in China before they attacked the US, but those weren’t insurmountable and the Chinese themselves were divided and warring amongst themselves. India was also within the Japanese military capability and was a war aim as well, and with the agreement between the Soviet Union and Japan, the fact that the British Empire you handwave away being strapped just maintaining a defense of the home islands, the defeat of the French (though they did fight on in their Pacific empire) and no other strong power in the region, the US was pretty much all that stood between Japan and the achievement of their visions of an Asian and Pacific rim empire.

Ironically, I think that your reasons for opposing the OP and Mueller are weird and wrong too, though interesting as always.

93

Your mistake is thinking that because empires eventually collapse that means empires are automatically bad ideas.

Yes, empires eventually collapse. Non-empires also eventually collapse. Everything eventually collapses. That’s what history is all about. Things change.

But some countries build empires that last for centuries. And the imperial power is prosperous for most of that period. You can sit there and say it’s pointless to build an empire if it’s all going to fall apart in the end. But most countries would be content with an empire that only lasts for the next five hundred years.

94

You seem to have a rather fluid definition for the word “aggressive.”

95

Actually, collapse isn’t necessarily the worst part. Empires that last for a long time require upkeep for that whole time, and as Hobson and others have pointed out, it’s a net loss to keep doing so.

Putin has watched the plots of the neocons unfold in Russia’s neighbors, and has seen such tendencies within Russia itself. Things escalated with the fascist regime installed in Kiev. Putin is completely unwilling to accept Ukraine becoming a dagger for NATO and the neocons, and, also considering the situation of the people of eastern Ukraine, has responded accordingly.

Moscow’s response could have been far harsher, a la US actions towards Central America in the 1980s (among other times). In 1986, General Paul Gorman freely admitted to reporters that if the worst were true and Nicaragua actually did somehow turn out to be a big Soviet base, it could be eliminated very quickly, and thus there was no danger to the US.

Germany was a big player in the neocon/neoliberal plot to dismember Yugoslavia, culminating in 78 days of airstrikes, often aimed at civilian targets, and all based on false pretenses. Incidentally, that war culminated in a scary stand-off between NATO and Russian troops at Pristina airport, and that chain of events is well-remembered in Moscow. In that conflict, Belgrade’s heavy-handed and very violent crackdown on the Kosovo Liberation Army (after many of the latter’s attacks) got Belgrade deemed “aggressive”, but strangely that label was not applied to the KLA, much less NATO, though it was quite apt in both cases!

I wouldn’t put it past Putin to cross the line, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. The point is that he clearly hasn’t yet, and even if he did, that wouldn’t necessarily constitute a threat to anyone else, least of all the United States! The United States (unlike Russia) has no strategic interest in Ukraine. The regime in Kiev deserves no American blood or treasure.

Besides, an expansionist Russia would first and foremost be a threat to itself.

96

What you still can’t seem to understand is that this was, indeed, the actual strategy used here on Earth Prime. We defended out possessions, rebuilt, started blowing the hell out of the Japanese navy and cargo fleet, but concentrated on Germany. The Pacific War was a sideshow. We never devoted our full resources to defeating Japan, we instead strangled their shipping and took out whatever islands we chose at whatever time we chose.

And you seem to somehow believe that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and then retreated back to Japan. They were also invading the Phillipines, Guam and Wake, plus invading the colonies of Britian, France, and the Netherlands. Of course, the Japanese plan after these territorial grabs was to defend the gains and hope that the allies would eventually have to recognize the status quo, what with the Europeans being occupied by Hitler. But hope is not a plan.

Of course the correlation of forces was strongly in favor of the US. As I’ve said multiple times, we didn’t use our full strength against Japan, but the little we did use crippled Japan’s ability to resupply its invading forces, and to ship back the resources captured by those invasions, which was the whole point of the invasions in the first place. I assume you’d be in favor of sinking Japanese cargo ships sending oil from the Dutch East Indes back to the home islands, yes?

The only way to engage in a non-war “containment” policy was if the Japanese agreed not to shoot at us anymore. But they weren’t going to do that unless we signed a treaty recognizing the status quo–the Dutch East Indies, Phillipines, Guam, Wake, French Indochina, Burma, and so on were now to be considered Japanese colonies, and we’d stop shooting at them. But that’s not a policy of containment, that’s a policy of surrender.

You’re arguing that we should have surrendered the day after Pearl Harbor and sign a treaty handing over the entire Pacific to the Japanese, and then cried about it and refused to trade with the Japanese and waited for their empire to collapse, rather than fighting back.

97

I don’t dispute the substance of your post. The question is whether fighting to defend those interests was worth, not just the cost incurred here on Earth Prime, but the higher end of the range of potential costs that should have been contemplated ex ante (which I would argue would exceed the 350,000 casualties actually incurred). The US responded to Japan’s aggression at Pearl Harbor etc by launching a campaign in which we incurred 350,000 casualties but were presumably prepared to incur far more. The tendency of conflicts to escalate in order to justify past losses already incurred is well known.

Mueller’s point is that what you describe is essentially the approach we took toward the USSR in Eastern Europe, and that policy was preferable to hot war/trying to occupy the USSR and force and unconditional surrender to our terms. Describing it as surrender is irrelevant to the question of whether that policy best served our national interests, which given the outcome of the Cold War I would say, in fact, it did.

98

This is based on the premise that those casualties were avoidable. The 350,000 casualties are people who were killed by Japan. You’re arguing the United States shouldn’t have fought against Japan. But you haven’t provided a credible argument about why Japan wouldn’t have fought against the United States.

If we sustained 350,000 casualties during a war in which we were actively fighting, we probably would have sustained a far higher number of casualties in a war in which we were being attacked but not fighting back. Because it’s a lot easier to kill people who aren’t fighting back. Rather than kill 350,000 people, Japan might have killed a million.

You’re still ignoring the huge vast immense difference in these two situation. The Soviet Union had not declared war on the United States. We were able to use only containment for that reason. If the Soviets had declared war, we would have had to stop using just containment and have fought a conventional war.

Keep in mind, we were using containment against Japan before Pearl Harbor. So we were trying to use the approach Pr Mueller advocates. But the approach became futile once the war started.

99

We should have had a prezzydent that would have gone over to Japan and bow. Then they would like us for being nice.

100

This is possibly one of the most silliest nonsense I’ve read in a while and would have played right into what the Japanese wanted as the US response. Only a thorough exercise of American economic and military superiority, resulting in the total destruction of the Japanese Empire was the appropriate response to such a blatant attack on Pearl Harbor and American possessions in the Pacific.