And it's war with the United States and everybody else
as we move south. The British, the Dutch, we're going to occupy
those areas of Southeast Asia, and since we think the
Americans won't leave us alone, we can't leave the Americans alone.
We have to get ready to attack them, too.
By the way, why were they so worried about the Americans?
And here, it's an ironic consequence of the
fact that the Americans had the Philippines and
also Hawaii. But especially the Philippines.
The Americans have bases in the Philippines.
If you leave those bases alone, they're right there next to Southeast Asia.
If the Americans hadn't been in the Philippines at all,
if McKinley hadn't decided to take them in 1898
and the nearest American bases were thousands of miles away,
it's not clear the Japanese would have felt they had to
go to war with the United States in 1941 at all.
Of course,
on the other hand, if America hadn't
annexed Hawaii in 1898, any capacity for America
to have interfered in events in the Far East would have been almost non-existent.
So as the Japanese make their choice,
this man, Prince Konoe, who had been worried about war with the United
States and feared where Japan was going, is pushed out of the lead.
Instead, taking his place,
is this man, General Hideki Tojo.
He can bring together the army and the navy, finally
reconciling their points of view in a lowest common denominator
position: that it's going to be war moving south, unless
the United States will go along with what the Japanese want.
The last critical stage that will lead to all out global war
is this question: Why no modus vivendi?
That is, the Japanese are reaching out for some sort
of negotiated settlement with the United States to avoid war.
The Americans understand that the Japanese
are looking for something, and the American's
have some interest in getting an agreement with the Japanese that will avoid war.
In other words, they want to find some way of just getting along.
A modus vivendi.
So why can't the Japanese and the Americans find some
way of kicking the can down the road?
Well part of it is, the Japanese want the Americans
to fundamentally go along with their continued expansion in China.
And frankly, from the very start, this issue of Japanese expansion
in China had been something the Americans were unwilling to accept.
The American commitment to China's future is an absolutely
critical cause of American entry into World War Two.
By the way, it's mainly for reasons of American attachment to Chinese hopes.
It's not because of American trade with China.
In fact, American trade with Japan is much larger than
its trade with China in the 1930s and early 1940s.
They also worry about discouraging their British and Chinese allies,
because they're anxious about Allied resolve to stay in the fight.
But the Americans weren't looking to have a war with the Japanese.
After all, remember, the American grand
strategy is Germany First, not Japan First.
So, if the Americans are getting into a war with Japan before they
get into a war with Germany, they've turned their grand strategy upside down.