A War It Was Always Going to Lose: Why Japan Attacked America in 1941

A War Was Always Going to Lose: Why Japan Attacked America in 1941 by Jeffrey Record Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books Inc., 2011 184 pages $24.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Jeffrey Record, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, is Professor of Strategy at the United Air War College, and the author of eight books, including Wanting War, Beating Goliath, Dark Victory, Making War, Thinking History; Hollow Victory; and The Wrong War. Most of these works are succinct; all of them bristle with provocative insight. The present volume is no exception. After an introductory overview of the general question of why Japan attacked the United States, subsequent chapters examine historical sources of antagonism between the two nations: Japan's aggression in China and Indochina and the US response; assumptions behind the approach to with the United States; why neither Japan nor the United could deter the other; and American and miscalculations. The final chapter presents lessons from Japan's Pearl Harbor decision for today's national security decisionmakers. Record rejects the classical realist model because it offers little allowance for the influence of fear, pride, and other emotions on the making of foreign policy, especially that of prewar Japan. On the contrary, It is the central conclusion of this study that the decision for against the United in 1941 was dictated by pride and Japan's threatened economic destruction by the United States (italics original). Convinced that fear and honor can motivate national actors as much as objective national interest, Record also insists that Japanese racism, fatalism, imperial arrogance, and cultural ignorance also powerfully influenced policymaking in Tokyo. At the highest ranks of the Army, operational thinking remained essentially primitive, unscientific, complacent, narrow and simplistic. Few leaders appreciated the limits of Japan's power. And according to constitutional arrangements, the Army could force out any cabinet it did not like simply by not permitting any serving officer to be Minister of War. That Japan's leadership would take the country, already tied down in an unwinnable in China, into a conflict with the United States, proved its irrationality. Record's discussion of economic sanctions, especially the famous Roosevelt oil embargo, is illuminating. The author thinks that serious economic sanctions need to be reassessed: they are not measures short of war but can be true acts of in themselves. When it imposed the oil embargo against Japan in the summer of 1941, the United was one of the world's great petroleum exporters, and Japan got most of its oil from the United States. The embargo confronted leaders with two choices: submit to America or seize the natural riches of Southeast Asia. The American price for lifting the oil embargo was withdrawal not only from French Indochina, but from China as well, forcing Japan to write off all her conquests and their costs in wealth and blood. …