Sarah Paine Episode 2: Why Japan Lost (Lecture & Interview)

29:24The first son of Japanese war and the second son of Japanese war, Russo Japanese war and the Pacific war, this is how all of them began. And finally Miyamoto offers some advice on how you break the enemy willpower. And in this case is you've already won conventionally but they're waging an insurgency against you on modernizing the terminology. And the idea is you want a psychological victory, you want them just to quit and somehow you're going to break their will to resist. And I suspect this is what the Japanese thought they were doing in the rape of Nanjing and other atrocities that they were going to do these horrifying things and that would break the will of the other side.

30:07Okay, be careful whom you put on death ground. The Japanese were repeating a mistake done by the Nazis which is if you're dealing with even a failing state which Russia was, the Stalin had shot so many of his officers in the 30s and then he inflicted a famine on Ukraine. But when the Nazis came in and they were going to wipe out not only the Russian government but also the Russian people, you will superglue people, government and military and you will transform a failing state into a lethal adversary. And this is what Nazi brutality does to Russians, what Japanese brutality does to Chinese and what Russian brutality today is doing to Ukraine.

30:56Don't do it, bad strategy. All right, there's strategic implications from these values. One is this emphasis on the offensive preemption. It's emphasis on military action to solve all your problems and you have a fixed policy objective. Whatever it is and if you're in a given battle you have to win that battle. It's not, oh I have an overarching objective, it's too costly here, I'm gonna call off this battle and I'm gonna try again somewhere else. Uh -uh, this, the moment your plan is failed, you're a failure. So they're not thinking of planning in terms of branches of sequels and they'll be unexpected events that take place, you'll adapt to none of that, your failure, funny, that stuff happens to you.

31:42So there's a real insensitivity to risk and there's no grand strategy but if you believe these things, you will be lethal and warfare. You're not gonna give up easily at all. And so you look at the Japanese at the end of the war and go, why don't they quit a lot earlier? Well it's because in a way they're already dead men. They've suffered social death and so they're gonna keep on until the very end of all of this. And it's a great sin of omission, this absence of grand strategy. The Japanese aren't the only ones to have done this. The belligerence on all sides and World War I were thinking all of, in terms of using the military instrument and got themselves into trouble.

32:29So if you look at what the Japanese are doing, they had some vague ambitions and wanted to take advantage of opportunities but there's no definition of what win in this war is how much territory should Japan take and then call it a day. They say done, we're supposed to be successful here. Rather, their territorial acquisitions are really a function of what they were able to take and what in anger they did take but also a function of strategic failure. No matter what they did, it never pacified the China theater problem for them. Okay, Alice, that was Wonderland. Now we're gonna get to how it works, how other people live of if you believe these things, how does it help explain what actually happened in World War II.

33:16And I'm gonna start with two sins of omission. The Japanese neglect of paying more careful consideration to logistics and then another sin of omission is an neglect of protecting their sea lines of communication. And then I'm gonna, the last two are about these in group, out group divisions. And the problems it calls cause for within each military service, interest service rivalries, and then between the two services, the Navy and the Army and the war that caused them such difficulties. Okay, the Japanese, if you started the beginning of the war, Japan never produced more than 113th US steel and coal production.

33:58It never did more than a 10 % of what US munitions productions were. I believe if you do the math and take all the battleships and divide people into everything that each US soldier had four tons of equipment per, whereas each Japanese soldier had about two pounds of equipment. Japanese main weapons in this war were the grenade and the bayonet, there are teleory and machine guns were totally, were very obsolete what they had going in the Pacific war. And then you flip it around, look at the United States. The United States had about 18 men and, or men I am one, mostly men, in supply services supporting each rifleman at the front.

34:40Other militaries in this period had about an eight to one ratio. Japan had about a one to one. So Japan's already suffering food shortages before Pearl Harbor. And then when you get to the winter of 1942, 43, the Japanese are having critical shortages of oil so they no longer can deploy the fleet at will. That means you forget about convoying anything because you just haven't got the oil to do it. And yet when you get to 45, when they're predicting they're gonna have absolutely zero aviation fuel and other fuel by the end of 45, you have the government saying, so we're gonna fight on for this honorable, whatever it's gonna be.

35:22These Bushido ideas, you just persevere, loyalty, honor, duty, keep going. All right, I am quoting this gentleman's diary, Admiral Ugaki Motome, he was the chief of the staff of the combined fleet until his plane and Admiral Yamamoto Soto -Oku's plane were shot down. US code breaking was quite good. We figured out where they were and we killed Admiral Yamamoto, but this man survived. And by the time he wrote this entry, he was the head of an air fleet on the home islands sending kamikaze flights out because Japan simply lacked the ability to do too much else this late in the day. And here is his last diary entry written on August 15th, 1945, this is after two atomic bomb bombs had been dropped and after the Russians had deployed into Manchuria.

36:22And he said, okay, there are various causes for today's tragedy. And I feel that my own responsibility is not light, but more fundamentally it was due to the great differences in national resources between the two countries. Okay, it's too late to come to that conclusion. US production statistics had been on the books forever, but when Japanese read these numbers, they thought they were ludicrously high and discounted them as propaganda. And those who knew better who'd done tours of duty in Britain or the United States, they weren't promoted because they were defeated us. I believe that Admiral Ogaki kept and maintained his diary is because he was an honorable samurai.

37:09He had believed in Bushido, the ability of material, of willpower to more than compensate for inferior resources, but the war's outcome had proved him incorrect. And so as an honorable samurai, he paid with his life and he kept his diary to nothing to be ashamed of. He done what he was gonna do. Here I have the last prime minister of Imperial Japan, Prince Higashi Kune Nadehiko talking about his take on the war. And he said, I think the basic cause of defeat was a loss of transport shipping. Okay, by the end of the war, Japan was down to one -ninth of its transport shipping. It meant the empire was paralyzed.

37:54What's the point of taking all these territories if you can't get the resources back? The Navy had always focused on the mission by Alfred Thair Mahan, who's from where I work back in the day, was all about fleet on fleet engagements and things. But it turns out that the Japanese Navy hadn't focused on convoy duty. Mahan had called that a promising secondary operation. Actually, it turned out to be primary in the Pacific that US submarine services paralyzed. There are sea lines of communication, go submarines. But so here's Admiral Ogaki Matame, who is talking about, he eventually comes around to recommending a more defensive strategy of not having this fleet on fleet because they don't have, they've lost a lot of the fleet and then they don't have the fuel to run it.

38:52But by the time he's recommending a more defensive strategy, they don't have the fuel or the assets to do that either. Earlier in the war, here's his take before all that bad stuff had happened. It's too bad for the officers and men of the submarine service that they have not yet sunk any important men of war, only merchant men while his disdain for the target would cost him. And he noted later on, or when he's trying to account for why the Battle of Guadalajuanal is going so badly for Japan, he said the aim of supply and transport to the front has not even been half fulfilled each time. It led those on the verge of death, I .e.

39:28the Army, to be extremely skeptical about the Navy and thinking that the Navy is just sacrificing the Army. Well, no kidding, that's what the Army thought, because for an expeditionary force, you absolutely need the Navy to deliver you there, to maintain your supplies there, and they're thinking the Army's thinking, you Navy are being irresponsible, not doing any of these things. So there are tremendous inter -service rivalries between the Army and Navy in Japan. And it goes back to the pre -war budget wars, where Japan's a resource poor country, and both services have what they consider absolutely essential things to be funded, Japan didn't have the money to fund both.

40:10And then when you get in war and you start expending these things, you need even more money. And so the disagreements were brutal. But before I get there, the in -group out -group differences that stovepipe things and cause problems aren't simply between Army and Navy, they're within each service. So I'm going to start there, and to be fair, I'm going to provide one example for each service, I'll start with the Army. It was a Glondon Army, or Japan's Army of Manchuria, that decided to invade all of Manchuria back in 31. It was not the home office back in Tokyo, but it's this branch that turns out, kicks off a 15 -year war.

40:51So these folks think that they know what's best for Japan and how best to defend the empire, and they're just often running. Meanwhile, there are a series of Ku -attemp's, some of them were Navy is part of it, a lot more of them were the Army that's dealing with it, going back and forth. And at the very end, when Emperor Hito is capitulating, there was one last Ku -attemp, which a minute failed, because the war might have turned it and it'd quite the way it did if it had succeeded. So the point is, you've got coups running on, that is not called unified command, it's a mess. And the Navy wasn't any better.

41:29I have a different sort of example here. During the war, the US air served, people who were flying planes, they would alternate combat and training missions so that you would bring back someone who had survived and learned something from combat to tell new people, the things to avoid, how not to get yourself killed, and some other things. Well, in Japan, in groups out groups, you sign up together, you train together, you fight together and you die together. It doesn't mean that Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups. It's just culturally, it's not the natural thing that comes to mind.

42:09Moreover, and this apparently applies to the present, that in the US military, they have what are called hot washes after different operations, when you come back, and you're very self -critical about all the things that went wrong, to figure out how to do it better the next time. Well, there are cultural reasons why you would not want to do that in Japan, just it's different. So if these in group out group things are causing problems within services, it gets toxic between the services. And I've got four examples, and I'm going to start with organizational issues. So it's only in 1944 that the Army and Navy finally get together to have regular liaisons meetings in Tokyo.

42:54Great, just in time to figure out how the capitulation's going to work. And then the Army wanted to unify the two high commands, the Navy wanted nothing to do with that one, because they knew they'd just become the box lunch delivery service for the Army, didn't want to do that. So by 1945, they did unify their information department. Great, they could spew the same propaganda and maybe share Tokyo roads on a good day, who knows. But there was no planning even under the imminent threat of invasion to how they're going to coordinate their assets to protect the home island. They aren't even coordinating their air assets.

43:36Disaster. And this disaster goes back way in time. They had a very far back in time. They had a very successful war against Russia, the ends of 1905. But afterwards in 1906, immediately afterwards, the Army and Navy are a lot of completely separate war plans. The Army plan is all about fighting Russia for the big land grab in Eurasia. The Navy plan has completely different set of enemies. It'd be the United States and Britain for the big gambit. You're not going to use ships in Siberia. The big gambit for empire in the Pacific. And each of these plans, either secret from the other service and be each plan assumes the other service is going to do all kinds of important things for them.

44:23OK, great. So I guess the idea of secrecy and surprise normally you apply that to your enemies, not your sister service. But that's how it works in this setup. Now, the Army does come around to the Navy plan. Why? Because they get walloped by the Russians on the Mongolian border at the Battle of Nohman Han. The Russians just decimate them in 1939. So now the Army says, OK, OK, maybe that Southern advance thing wasn't such a bad idea. And so the Navy thinks this is great. And they do their Southern advance. They go zooming down. The Japanese mind over matter, stuff seems to be going really well.

45:09Because in 1942, the Army takes more land than or over more dispersed theater than any country in the planet. The Navy hasn't lost a single ship. I mean, it's looking really good. Except there are a few little details here that are a problem. What the Navy hadn't told the Army is that actually they weren't ready for this whole thing that they needed this outer perimeter reinforced by airfields in order to make the thing work. And that wasn't complete. And the Army learned about this on August 17, 1942, because one of these airfields was being built in this tropical nightmare called Guadalcanal that the United States knew about, even though the Army didn't.

45:54And also the Navy is in deep dark trouble and needs the Army to help them out of Guadalcanal. So now, thanks, Samurai. The Japanese 17th Army had been ordered to take Port Moresby and New Guinea. That's what they were up to. But with Guadalcanal, they are told, you need to tack on Guadalcanal to that Port Moresby event. OK, internal logistics. There are 1 ,000 kilometers apart. So now the Army is going to be lying to the Navy about how many people they've got at Guadalcanal because they're scared that the Navy won't provide enough rations and things. The Navy doesn't provide enough rations, people starve anyway.

46:30And then the Navy that got the Army into this mess wants to call it off and move out. But the Army, good Samurai, want to fight on. And they just expend all kinds of resources. And this thing has enormous strategic effects. Prior to Guadalcanal, the Japanese Army wanted to continue their strategy of chasing the Nationalists out of China. Back in 1937, the Japanese had conquered Nanjing, which is the original nationalist capital. And the Nationalists fled up the Yanzhou River to Chongqing, beyond some gorges and some other things, and beyond the rail network. And in 1943, the Japanese were playing to attack Chongqing.

47:12And then at that point, I think if you're a Nationalist, you're fleeing into Burma. And if that had happened, then the Japanese could have probably pulled hundreds of thousands of people out of the China theater and put them elsewhere. And that would have caused all kinds of problems. Also, the Japanese had to call off their plans to invade Australia. So Guadalcanal has enormous strategic implications. So if you're focusing Samurai on one battle, Guadalcanal, well, it has implications in places called China and Australia that are a long way off. OK, the United States also had inter -service rivalries, right, between our army and navy.

47:51And that's why you have two separate campaigns for Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur. Big Egos won campaign for each Ego. And apparently that wasn't even big enough from MacArthur. OK, but even so, I don't believe the inter -service rivalries in the United States were remotely on the scale that they were in Japan. I have one final example to prove that one. So after Pearl Harbor, that had been tremendously successful for Admiral Yamamoto, he wanted to do the next thing was to attack Midway, because you were in US -facing there. And the army said, I don't want, we're not going to do this. And Yamamoto goes, I'm going to resign.

48:32And the army, we don't care. I'll commit suicide. Well, by popcorn. And here's what changes this. So after Pearl Harbor, Americans wanted to let the Japanese know that we were thinking about them. And so this is where Lieutenant Colonel James do little, the do little raids, named after him. In April 1942, it was a one -way trip, often aircraft carrier, because they had so much fuel in order to get to Japan. The idea was they're going to go bomb Japan in the ditch in China, whoever survives. Very brave people who did this. And are they going to cause massive damage in Japan? Well, yeah, if you're directly underneath, you won't appreciate it.

49:15But in general, it causes minor damage. But it has a major unimposed, anticipated strategic benefit, think samurai. The army, all of a sudden, is backing the Navy, that they're going to now do Midway with them. And it's right, don't think retaliate of endger honor. The army was appalled that anyone had been able to bomb Japanese skies, so now they're all over it. Okay, so how does Midway work out? Really poorly for the Japanese. They lose four aircraft carriers. They've only got 12. They've lost a third. Oops. And here we go, in group out group, the Navy doesn't tell anyone for three or four months.

49:59Incredible, in a war, right? So they're thinking about their little stovepipe and they're ignoring Japanese interests when this is going on. Okay, different story. So they do get their operational end to the whole thing. It's called, this is the fire bombing of Tokyo. The whole place went up in flames. In fact, it got so hot, the canals boiled. It's an operational solution. It's an unconditional surrender after a protected war of annihilation that destroys just about every single Japanese sitting minus a couple that survived. What broke the stalemate? And here's what happened. It's three really bad things that happened in four days.

50:46Talk about a concentration of really bad events from a Japanese point of view happening all at once when you wanna talk about, this is the psychological shattering that actually happens to the Japanese. First, the United States drops in atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Two days later, the Russians pour 1 .5 million people into Manchuria, the nightmare scenario of the Japanese army. And they know if this war portrays, the Russians are gonna come down through Manchuria, down the Korean Peninsula, onto Hokkaido and down the whole Milans. It'll yield a divided Japan if it goes on for a long time. And then you have the next day, the United States drops the second atomic bomb with a bluff.

51:28The idea being, we're gonna keep doing this daily or every other day. Except we don't have any more atomic bombs and we cannot build them quickly for a long time. So that's big bluff. But the emperor then has had enough and he breaks the deadlock in the cabinet and the cabinet allows the deadlock to be broken the next day. And then he makes an unprecedented radio broadcast, never had that happen before, to his subjects telling them game over. And then the next day, he sends three imperial princes to the Manchurian, Chinese, and Southern theaters, conveying his orders at game over. And from that moment on, his samurai obeyed him and they absolutely cooperated with the occupation.

52:13There's no insurgency, no nothing going on after this. And at the end of the war, the United States came to understand the Japanese. At the beginning, totally misread this situation with the embargo that's meant to deter and state it precipitates the war that we didn't want. But at the end of the war, the United States realizes you're gonna need some level of Japanese cooperation if you're gonna occupy the place. And they're gonna use Emperor Hito for this. Here Hito is scared to death. That it's not so much that he'll be hanged but that the United States will extinguish his dynasty, kill him and his son and then it's over.

52:53And so he's willing to sign any piece of paper that Arthur puts under his pen. And one of those is the Constitution of Japan that is gonna change their civil and military institutions, demilitarize the place and try to get a democracy going there. It's the Constitution was written in one week by MacArthur's staff, they're running around rating, bombed out libraries for examples of Western constitutions and they cobbled this thing together. And this is the unamended Constitution of Japan still in effect to this very day, MacArthur's gift to Japan. I've been incredibly critical of the Japanese, but to sum up here, their cultural explanations for their neglect of grand strategy, inability to cut their losses, inability to coordinate and the ferocity with which they fought.

53:46So if you look at their values and their explanatory of what may well happen when things get set off. But I've been really critical of Japan, I want to even out the story by ending on the United States a little bit because the United States played a good game or a bad game of half court tennis and mirror image at the beginning of the swore. So when the Japanese go into Manchuria in 1931, we want them out, we don't ask what, why are you doing this? And their answer would be, well, hey, you passed the Holy Smooth tariff. That means this weird trade dependent, whom am I going to trade with? And once you did the tariff, everyone retaliated, so you've now shut down international trade.

54:31So we needed an empire that's big enough to survive. So that's why we're in Manchuria. And by the way, there are way too many communists here, and we got to get rid of those. And then in 1937, when they up the anti and going into the rest of China, we didn't inquire what's going on. And what the Japanese want to do is wall off communism, don't want that. And then they want to stabilize China so that you can have some productive economic growth. And you can go, well, what were US post -war objectives for China? Ooh, sounds remarkably familiar. Communists out, stabilize the place. Okay, well, how does the war affect all of this?

55:09Well, actually, the warfare that went on wiped out the two barriers to communist expansion in Asia. What are the barriers? Well, one, it's Shankai Shackin, the nationalist in China, the Japanese wipe him out. They don't totally defeat him, but they have so weakened him and so discredited him. But by the end of the World War II, he is really poorly positioned to win the Chinese Civil War, which he probably loses. And then when it's the United States, what's the other barrier to communists? What's the Japanese? We wipe them out. So what do you get? A unified communist China, which makes really complicated wars in the Korean War and Vietnam War.

55:49And the problem is the gift that keeps on giving. We're still dealing with this problem. Today, so take a little word from Sunza, know your enemy or the other side. Know the person you're talking to. Don't play half -court tennis. It's a really dangerous game. Rather try to analyze, ask yourself, why is someone doing whatever they're doing? And just because you're trying to understand it, doesn't mean you're condoning it. It's just trying to figure out the logic of the other person. It'll set you up for more informed choices. Before we move on to the interview, a quick word from our sponsors, Scale AI.

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57:13Whether through its work with the government or businesses like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Meta, Scale is at the forefront of US AI innovation. If you're interested in learning more about how Scale Powers Frontier AI capabilities go to scale .com slash Dwarkech. All right, back to Sarah. I'm a little bit confused on some of the Bushido stuff and how it explains Japan's actions in the war. Uh -oh. So, look, this Zen Buddhism stuff, the cherry orchards that are blossoming and you must act with the generosity of a samurai, all this Bushido moral stuff. How does that square with the conduct of Japan during the war, the rape of men king, the killing of millions of Chinese, the treatment of prisoners of war, which rival the fatality rates of the Nazi extermination camps.

58:04It seems like there's a, where's the Buddhism there? Where's the, well, I am not an expert on Buddhism. Oh, but, see, you've got a lot of things conflated in there. Uh, if you're asking about, um, the part of the brutality of the war is, Japan's totally out of resources and you're thinking it's going through a massive area of territory, they actually had no ability to take POWs or if they took POWs that have to halt the military operation and then you got to put these people somewhere and so they just slaughtered them instead. And not there were POWs or there were cases of hostile civilians who also got slaughtered because I don't know the because, but they had very limited, limited numbers of people to deal with this.

59:02So, on the one hand, you've got absolute desperation. I don't think any people behave well when they're desperate. The war had been going on for years by the time we get interested in it, right? It starts in 31. So you have desperate people. Uh, there's another piece, I can just add little pieces, I can't explain a whole people that in the prison camps, so in Japan, if I'm going to be, let's say you were Japanese, you and I are looking at each other in the eye. That's how you do it in the West, show that you're paying attention. That's not how you do it in Japan. In Japan, if you're Japanese, I'm looking at your shoulder.

59:39It's rude to look people in the eye. It's just too intrusive. You're getting too much information probably from that person's face. So you can imagine a Western or a prison camp looks as guard in the eye. And the eye is going, the guard is going, oh, who is this arrogant person? You're a kid, you can imagine bad things of that, it's going to be happening. These are guesses on what's going on. There are certain values that I've talked about. There's certain desperation that's going on, and then there's the dehumanization of what war times all about, right? Initially, conscripts go in of all armies having trouble killing people, and then they get better at it over time.

1:00:22This is a tragedy of human beings. I don't know if it answered your question. I don't know that I know the answer. Okay, so here's another thing that I want to clarify. Look, if you were trying to understand Britain's conduct in World War I, why they initiated it, and why they conducted it in the way they did. And you try to understand it using cultural explanations, what some British guy wrote in the 17th century. I don't know how far you'd get, and maybe the more illuminating thing is just to look at like immediately what was happening in the 1910s, what were the proximal strategic objectives.

1:00:54So with Bushido, why are we looking back at what people were writing in the 1700s? I'm gonna break up the British thing into two parts. So one analytical framework is you can look at wars in terms of underlying causes and proximate causes. The underlying causes are like the tender of grievances on both sides, and there can be cultural components to that or other components. And so there's this accumulating tender of where you've got two different sides at least across purposes, but then there's the match, the proximate cause, which is a whole series of matches and finally the last one's Pearl Harbor, and you are up and running to a place you might not wanna go to, right?

1:01:38So there's that. And then there's culture, let's look at Britain strategic culture, and I'm no expert on British street -to -culture, but these are some basics. So they're in Ireland, and they wanna be able to trade with the world, but they don't want any one -powered dominating the continent. So this is their strategic thinking from way back. And so if there is a power that's on the verge of dominating the continent, you wanna back the other side to prevent that outcome. So that's very much a part of British thinking goes back a long time, and you can read things going a long time of describing that situation.

1:02:17There's another piece that goes back a long time in the British. Navies are rarely decisive and warfare. What do I mean by decisive? It means you actually get the goal that you're after for fighting, whereas armies can be, if your goal is, I wanna occupy all of France, or better yet, the Holland, something smaller. Yeah, an army can probably, might be able to do that for you, one instrument of national power, but Britain's reliant on a navy and doesn't like to have a big standing army. And so they're thinking in terms of diplomacy and allies, and working economics, making money from trade. And so they are the ones who coined the term grand strategy.

1:02:57It is their gift to us, and it absolutely informs their thinking at a very macro level. So no one thing is entirely explanatory. Also, we human beings game the system. The moment I tell you your Japanese and you think this way, is the moment go, oh, that's what she thinks. Ha ha ha, we're just like different, right? So this is the problem with human beings. Hmm, the loyalty precept. Uh, ha, wasn't one of the problems with the Japanese military that they weren't loyal, that they were trying to do these coups all the time, and the young officers were, and subordinate. Yeah, it's an excellent question.

1:03:35And what you're doing is feeding me back, the Greek principle of logic, which is the law of non -contradiction. You cannot simultaneously believe, mutually exclusive things. So what's going on, you're telling me, it's all hierarchical, and now you're telling me junior officers are doing, or mid -level officers are doing things, what's going on here? Ah, but that's a fundamental principle of logic that the West puts great credence on, not the case in the East necessarily. Now now people have educations that are different. So we're going back in the day, where people are not looking in terms of, okay, we're gonna have a logically consistent argument, rather there are these social values that we are gonna, if it's all about group loyalties, that's what we're gonna prioritize.

1:04:25And if my subgroup is gonna be my unit, or whatever, that's how that's gonna go. So you're doing a wonderful piece of Western logic. It's excellent. And this is why other cultures find dealing with Westerners like battery acid, because they have, these different belief systems and you go like, okay, you have women and we got women. Our women drive cars and yours are like where? Is there something wrong with your women? It's battery acid on other cultures. I was struck when you were describing, the Nazis were putting their enemies on death ground, the Japanese were putting their enemies on death ground.

1:05:05And in both cases, it was detrimental because you were preventing the other side from surrendering. That seems even worse than what was happening before that period in history, where look, you can think over time that our norms about civility and war crimes are improving over time, but it seems like in World War II, the way people were acting was even worse than they were acting in World War I. The way like Germany and Russia were fighting in World War I was probably more civil than how they were fighting in World War II. And then obviously what what Japan was doing and trying to at the time, what was going on around the world that people just got so demonic during this period?

1:05:42No, it's not, more or less it's not civil, you're killing people. I love people talk about just wars and it's rather a horrible piece of human existence. So there are a number of things have gone on with the Industrial Revolution. You can now kill people on an industrial scale. When you're doing with bows and arrows, it takes a lot more time to create the mayhem. So that's one thing, the ability just to wipe out people. World War I on the Western Front was all entrenched. On the Eastern Front there was a great deal of movement, but on the Western Front it was entrenched which meant civilian populations weren't really touched by it.

1:06:19Right, where the initial fighting, yeah, they're leveled. But once you get a trench, you're not. And then we in the West don't actually study too much what happened to the civilians on the Eastern Front where it's moving around. This is back to my half court, Tena. So we're not paying attention to those civilians. So for the West, very few civilian casualties, whereas when you get to World War II, you're bombing people, you're not technologies, you can get at people. And invading also it's the lesson of World War I. The feeling that the Germans really hadn't felt their defeat and that allowed them to make up this story about how it was.

1:06:59They weren't defeated, the Jews did it or whoever. They were betrayed. And Churchill and Roosevelt decided there would be a march to Berlin to disabuse them of that. And then Voss killing a lot of civilians to get to Berlin. And of course the Russians were determined to pay back for what the Nazis had done to them. And we had no sympathy for what we weren't gonna, we're gonna turn the blind eye what the Russians were up to because the Nazis had been so heinous. This is probably wrong, I want you to correct me, but maybe one way you can explain why the Japanese were so brutal in their campaign around this time is, if you think that when you lose, you have this idea that you have social death, it's better to kill yourself than go back to your family and say I surrendered.

1:07:44Maybe they just applied, this is their failure to empathize with or think it from the perspective of their enemy, but they were just thinking like, listen, if we lost, we would commit sepuku. When they lose, they forfeit human rights. And in some sense, they was just like applying the principle of social death to their enemy. The whole war is brutal. So they're doing a lot of hand to hand brutality. And part of it has to do with lack of equipment. That fire bombing of Tokyo happened in one night. I think it's 80 ,000 Japanese are incinerated. Okay, let's talk about brutality. Now, the reason why Americans did that is because they knew the alternative was ascending American kids on the Japan who would die doing that.

1:08:38And so the decision was, it was better to kill a lot of Japanese civilians than it was to kill American soldiers. And that's also the reason that went into the atomic bombing. That's controversial, right? The Americans, why did they drop atomic bombs on the Japanese? And there was no disagreement about that in the United States at the time because it was a question of, are you gonna send American young men your age and millions of them would have died hitting the home islands? Or are you gonna do the bombing? And of course the Americans did the bombing. So there's brutality all around in this war.

1:09:17The war still come up with clean hands. Was there anywhere for the West or for America to win the Pacific War without the fire bombing? Well, okay, this is a whole other topic. When in wars, what does win mean? For us, it was put Japan back in its box, right? But this is a whole problem for Japan, what's win? Or this country in Afghanistan, what's win? Is it booting a Somal bin Laden out of Afghanistan once that happens? Is it today? Is it overthrowing the Taliban at a particular period? Or is it trying to turn the whole place into a democracy? Okay, those are all radically different things, but you need to make up your mind what it's gonna be.

1:10:00I think it's a miracle. Well, hey, okay. The win, if you're gonna have the win be that the United States transforms Japan into a functional democracy or sets them on the road so that they will become them. If that's what the win is, no. Because if you don't, I show you the three horrible events in four days, that's quite incredible to have that much bad news happening in a half a week. And that absolutely shattered the Japanese. And it also opened the door for those who thought they were in crazy land to capitulate. If you don't do that, okay, we invade the home islands, Americans were sick of the war.

1:10:48And you start losing lots of American kids in Japan. I think at some stage, we decided to pull them out of Japan and blockade them internally. And then you've got, I don't know, Japan is like a new North Korea, just this inevitable, these eternal, non -functioning society, so no. These wars are tragic. And also don't think that you have all the cards that you're gonna make the decisions about what's gonna happen, the other side's gonna put you into corners where you're gonna choose from very unpleasant alternatives. I wanna ask you about how the war starts. So there's obviously that go 10 years before and you've got the tariffs and that creates the incentive to build an empire.

1:11:36But even months before when there's negotiations between Japan and America to get rid of the embargo, it's striking to me how much miscommunication and the ability for both sides to just understand that there was a compromise here was such a big factor here where I feel like a Prince Canoei and FDR could get on like a Zoom call. I feel like the war. You're an optimist. Think about, let's talk about sunk costs. And I'm gonna talk about sunk casualties. By the time you're there, the Japanese have suffered 600 ,000 casualties in China. There is no easy out of that one. And so the United States's minimum program is you get out of China, not happening if you're Japanese.

1:12:32There's, you look at the government. The government's definitely on death ground with that one because there's no way they stay in power if they get out of China. And particularly, this is why Hirohito is Mr. Silent for most of the war. Initially he's all for it until it goes sour and then he's less so. As he knows that he'll be, if not assassinated, declared insane and then his perfectly serviceable adolescent son or however old his son was would be the token emperor. So I don't think, no matter the zoom call, is not gonna change the fundamentally high stakes that are involved for both sides.

1:13:12Oh, you really think if Hirohito had stepped in and they're like, no, we're not doing this, that he would have been you served as emperor? Yeah, early on. Oh, there's another piece. Let's look at the United States in 1941. Great depression, isolation, this is where the first America firsters are. They're the ones who created the idea that didn't wanna know about all these foreign places. The totally isolationist Hawaii wasn't even a state, doesn't become a state until 1959. If you're Japanese, you're in a place, oh, it's a colony. So it'll be like sort of the dog that barks. You take a newspaper and thwap them a few times and maybe the dog will start barking.

1:13:52Cause what the Japanese want is the United States just minus on business, stanza Asia. It's our backyard, it's not your backyard. And looks at the United States, United States doesn't have that much trade with Asia compared to the rest of the world. Sure, it sells Japan most of its oil, but that's not most of US trade. I was reading about this before, I'm preparing to interview you. And the particular cases were diplomacy broke down. So there's examples where the translators between Japan and America are, and I can't believe this is true. You can tell me if this is not, but they're exaggerating what each side is saying to make them more vivid to read.

1:14:28Like, if Tojo says something conciliatory, it's exaggerated to make it sound. And that's like obviously not the role of a diplomatic translator. And there's many cases where after the war Tojo says, if we had gotten the modus of Vandy, that FDR apparently was contemplating send into us. If we saw those agreements, we would have agreed. Or apparently they were, they misunderstood the final agreement that got from Secretary of State Hall where it said that you must return China. They thought included Manchuria, hold them intended to include it in Anchuria. They might have said yes to that. It seems like the work really could have been averted if it's like a couple of mis -translations were avoided.

1:15:02Okay, I wouldn't take Tojo as my source for anything. He's a guy who, he was before graduating class of cadets or something. He was talking about how even media, people had said that he was mediocre and but look where he'd risen to be and he's this great man. And then at the end when he's supposed to commit suicide, well the way you do it is I've described and he's an army officer. So what does he do? He takes a gun and he shoots himself, and it's buddy, point blank range with a gun. How hard is it? How hard could it be? And he survives that one and we glue him back together. So here's the honorable samurai who sent so many children or young people to their deaths.

1:15:48And at the end when he knows full well what he's supposed to be doing can't do it. So I wouldn't take him as my source. Also at the end he's got this whiny answer of, oh, it wasn't my fault, it's all your translators. And oh, the peace on Manchuria, no, I don't know that that would have been a compromise because the League of Nations had sent in something called the Litton Commission, which had told the Japanese they had to get out. And oh, by the way, it is a fiction that Manchuria is not a part of China. It is an integral part of China. Has been for the longest time. What the Japanese did is a kidnap the last Qing emperor, Manchuria, whose ancestors came from Manchuria, popped him in Henry Puyi, made him the emperor, just tried to come up with this fiction that, oh, Manchuria is a separate place.

1:16:36Excuse me, it's not, it's part of China. It's the internationally recognized territory of China. So I wonder if one of the problems here is, look, it was not in the vital strategic interest of America to secure or liberate China. In fact, the outcome of the war, obviously, is a nationalist who's the communist big power. And we'll talk about it in the next lecture. That was a very opposite of liberating China. So basically America puts in this oil embargo and knows that the outcome of failed negotiations on getting rid of that embargo is a total world war of this kind. And it's not even for the main strategic objective, which is, you know, you gotta get Hitler, you gotta be Germany.

1:17:19What, I mean, wasn't this just our failure grand strategy to realize, why are we doing this? What's the strategic objective here? All of them, we weren't fighting Germany. The only reason we fought Germany is because Hitler made a major blunder. He had an alliance with Japan that said, if Japan was attacked, he would come in. Not with Japan attacked someone else that he would come in. And in terms of broadly, and he declares war on this country, that is how the United States got into World War II Europe. If Hitler had not made that blunder, FDR would have been in a world of trouble trying to explain why he's suddenly gonna be fighting Nazis over an attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese.

1:17:58So that's a separate issue. The main thing that Americans who thought deeply cared about is the international system, that we should deal with each other through laws, through freedom of navigation. So this is how you run your commercial transactions, that big countries don't get to overrun small countries, because if they do, the entire international system goes down. And the logic that you're describing is excellent logic, and this is what the Japanese are saying. It's like, why would the Americans care about this? Americans care deeply about the international system, or people who are thoughtful about it.

1:18:41And it's also like, why not let the Russians eat all of Ukraine? Why are the Europeans suddenly all over this problem, right? And they've unified very recently on this, it's because the whole system is at stake. So it is really high stakes at a strategic level. The Japanese are looking at the operational level, and going, why do you care about these countries? We care about the entire system, because our prosperity is based on it. So I wonder if the problem here is that America, isn't at least at the time, wasn't willing to give enough concessions to the factions within Japan, that care about peace so that they can safe face and actually argue for ending war, where just the idea that they're going to give up mensurias, well, obviously that's not going to happen.

1:19:30And when Secretary of State of Hologram sees these vacillating telegrams from the Japanese, he assumes this because they're fickle or something. It's like, no, it's a civilian part of the government, like trying its best to prevent the military from taking over. And you've got to give them something to say to face, you know? The JAP, that faction had already lost, and they lost in 1936. Takahashi Korekyo's Japan's longest -serving finance minister, and he was a very distinguished man. In fact, he brought the Japanese economy out of the great depression before anyone in the West was doing his through government spending and trying to get people to spend at home.

1:20:08And he told the army, he said, if you go on this bent for empire, you're not going to actually get resources because you're going to spend a lot of money fighting with people, resources doing that. And then it's going to take you years of investments to access these resources. So you've got to be able to cover these investments for years and years and years. Cooperate within the international system. That is the way to prosperity for Japan. Well, that was the February young officers' revolt where he and I can't remember how many others were murdered. They came to his home in the middle of the night and as he stood up to talk to them, they literally hacked him apart.

1:20:48They had lost. That whole game is over. But Prince Genoy doesn't, like he knows, he's going to, the person who's prime minister in 1941 realizes that they're going to lose a war against America. And he doesn't want to do that. He just, that Tojo, the war minister at the time, doesn't answer to him. There are people, the prime minister, like, doesn't want war. And we don't give him enough to save face. They have a huge army there that's more than capable of assassinating people and they get in the way. So that ship is sailed. This is what a pivotal decision is. Once you've made it, there's no going back to the way the world was.

1:21:25And Japan lost too many people. And there are too many figures in the army. It's some, we think that it's an inevitable outcome of the, of having the world the way it is now with this, Japan, this wonderful country now.

1:21:46Just at the lead of so many different level areas of human endeavor. And we think, oh, that's the inevitable outcome. It's not. I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, is there anything America could have done in the immediate years leading up to the war? It could have prevented this outcome because the fact that there is a world, like, pretty much, you should assume that if there is a world war, things weren't done optimally, right? And I don't, I mean, everybody's equally at fault. But is there anything that could have been differently? Yeah, holly smooth. But like in the years, but directly before.

1:22:18But this is serious. Is we all live, that holly smooth tariff is a game of half court tennis. You're looking at the United States, it's in a terrible depression. You want to protect jobs here. And so you raise these big tariff walls. And then, okay, what's the other side and that's going to do? They're going to raise their tariff walls and pay you back. What's that going to do? It's going to cost a lot of American jobs if you play that game. You need to be talking with other people. So once you have set the conditions, hot house conditions for fascists to take over in Germany and in Japan, you are in a world of hurt.

1:22:55That's the easy solutions are no longer there anymore. So maybe I'll ask the questions this way. The oil embargo was at a mistake because the idea to protect the international system prevent empire. Well, we got more empire, we got a world war, we got communist taking over in China. Whatever's going to happen if you got rid of the oil embargo can't have been worse than that, right? Well, what yeah it was, what Roosevelt was really scared of was that the Japanese would attack Russia. Because that he thought Russia would fall. And if Russia fell, he thought the Nazis would win. So at least for the Japanese attack, they attacked us.

1:23:30That was actually better than attacking Russia. So the oil embargo, if you wanna, so let's say you don't do it in Japan, never attacks us. And then the Russians are down and you've got Nazis in control of the world. So must we better? This is even, but you don't have the world war with America. Like, it doesn't seem insane to think that. And we're still gonna find the Nazis. You're not gonna have an international system. Oh, and you've, if that's the case, and the Nazis were gearing up, cause eventually they're gonna fight us. Cause so this is another problem. Another concept that I think is useful is limited versus unlimited objectives.

1:24:16A limited objective, what unlimited objective is I wanna do regime change in your country. The most unlimited variety is that not only do I wanna do regime change, but I wanna kill all your people while I'm at it. So if that is what your opposite number is planning, if you compromise with them, you are simply setting them up and putting them in a stronger position when they come at you for the final kill. If they have limited objectives, then by all means compromise with them and negotiate away on what is it? You want just this little sliver of territory or you want some preferential treatment.

1:24:57We can do that for you. But you're talking about a world order here where there's gonna be based on laws increasingly or these opposing spheres of influence. To keep pushing back on this. I don't have an answer. I've given you what little I can think of it. But hey, I'm not the grand propiter in this world. These questions you're asking me are way above my pay grade. So people in the YouTube comments section didn't mad at me when I keep asking about counterfactuals. And I understand, obviously I don't understand what's happening at the time. I'm not even about history, whatever. But I do think it's important, what are we trying to do when we try to understand history?

1:25:37We're trying to understand if we had done things differently. What would have happened? What are the lessons we take? And counterfactuals are the main way we can do that. I'm off for it. We teach by counterfactuals. A replay and can you come up with different options? I think you're in a series of really awful options. The difference between the Japanese and the Nazis is that the Nazi's had the ideology was that we got to kill millions of people. That is what they believed. The Japanese didn't in the same way have the idea. And naturally they had, they were continental empire, they also wanted trade.

1:26:11And they don't like communists. They don't want the communists to take over in China. It just seems like naturally, if we didn't go to war with them, we might have been allies as we ended up being later on. Well, they attacked us and... After the oil embargo. Yeah, yeah, but... But the question is, should we have got them under the oil embargo? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But the Japanese are saying we have the rights to your oil. Excuse me. We have the right to sell it or not sell it to anyone we feel like. All right, it's... Since when do they have the rights to it? Okay, great. So you're gonna do all this crazy stuff and then still think we have to sell you oil.

1:26:45And oh, by the way, this oil is being used to kill Chinese all over the place. This is what their Japanese bombers are running on. Yeah. If you're like, no, I mean, I'm morally agree. We don't wanna like, they don't own our oil. The question is like, there's not the bottom, like, are they entitled to it? It's like, should we have given it to them with the outcome of them better if we did? I'm telling you, I suspect the outcome wouldn't have been better, but I don't know, right? And you're asking me things where my experience is, I'm just a professor. I just, you know, show up at seminar on time.

1:27:19And I try to do reading and prep. And my experience has not been in government, let alone at the highest echelons of government of what's feasible and what's not feasible. And the answers I've given you are where I'm at, but I don't, I can't tell you more. Mm. All right. I'll ask about other things too.

1:27:44The, the, the, the sort of like, delusional optimism of the Japanese to think that they could be to America. How much of that is motivated by the idea that they actually do think they're led by a living deity? Like, did that make, or is it just, is that related to why they thought they could win? No, I, but, but you're looking at the United States as isolationist. If you're Japanese and you're looking at these absolutely isolationist Americans, right? Who are letting Britain their closest ally potentially go down to Nazis, right? Because think about Britain, it'd been what had it all worked. Fall of France, fall of Norway, fall of France, then they lost Crete.

1:28:24We aren't even in the war. They're about losing everything and we're not doing anything. So, wait, I'm saying, now I'm losing my track of my, my, my train of faith. We're revisiting the question again, please. Can somebody in the audience remember the question?

1:28:45Yeah, we're up to some of the Japanese. So they're looking at it and going, the United States is not bailing out. It's, it's key ally. Hawaii's a colony, right? It's a bunch of white people dominating Hawaiians. So we're just going to do a little, a certain example that, hey, if you mess with us, it's going to get costly and we know you don't have much trade in Asia. Sure, we want to buy you oil, but overall most trades elsewhere. And so they're looking at it. Isolationist won't want the answer to be the isolationist. Go, woo, this is expensive. Let's get out of here. And of course, that's not understanding Americans.

1:29:24I remember I was in seminar the day that 9 -11 happened. And the TV, there was TV in the seminar rooms. And there was a break. And after the end of the break, the students had the TV on and we're watching Tower One had gone down. And then while we're in seminar, the next one we're watching, it goes down. And I thought, oh, my, there's going to be hell to pay for this one. Because this is how Americans are. That if you mess with us, boys, it get ugly. And boy, this is like, don't think, retaliate. So the Japanese didn't understand that part of us. And I think a lot of people don't. They look at Americans.

1:30:02We look at a bunch of hedonists. But if you mess with us, it's ugly. If you are in the Japanese government a couple years before, like 1939 or something, it sounds like from your earlier answer that you think it was sort of hopeless situation. If you're the finance minister, if you're the prime minister, is there anything they could have done to prevent an inevitable conflict with the government? They brought it up and they say, well, we can't afford this. The resources aren't here. And the army wasn't interested. And they shut up because the last guy had been killed in his house as pajamas. So they weren't up for that.

1:30:39How much stock do you put in the idea that if you have a society that rapidly industrializes, that goes from a feudal state to advance industrial nation and a generation, that it just not enough time for the cultural to evolve. And so the way that the Japanese behaved and the lead up to the war and during the war, the feudal values just didn't have a chance to evolve in the major restoration happened too fast. No, it didn't happen too fast, but institutions take a long time to take root. Look at this country. It's been an evolving democracy for hundreds of years. OK, we no longer have slavery, amen.

1:31:21But you look at today really consequential things about our own institutions. So now we're going to go pick on the Japanese because they managed in one generation to westernize their political, judicial, legal, educational, you name it. They westernize them. But there wasn't enough time for these things to grow deep roots. And then if you think about who's doing this, they're called a Genro, this very distinguished generation of Japanese who all knew each other. And so their career paths were very broad, covering both civil and military areas. And when they died, they couldn't transfer their prestige to anyone else.

1:32:05Nor had they institutionalized it in some kind of cabinet or something that would force all these different, fact groups to discuss things without giving a primacy to the military. And then understand what is the tradition in Japan. Shogunet, that's what Japan had before. What's a Shogun? Shogun is a Japanese word for general. So the long history of Japan is military rule. So when it comes back in World War II, that in a way is a kind of normalcy. It would have taken a long time. So this comes back to the United States and fooling around with tariff walls, thinking that was such a clever idea.

1:32:47Maybe if the Great Depression had been managed better, it would have given time for these institutions to take deeper roots. No one knows, but I would not criticize the major generation, they're brilliant. They did so much, but you're talking just a number of years. And let's look at this country. We're really having major problems with our institutions. We're wondering whether we've got a stalemated legislature, whether we got a skewed court system, or whatever it is, and we're sorting these things out. And then to criticize the Japanese, because they couldn't do it all in 25 years. One thing I found really interesting in your book is that you were arguing that not only was the military, not in charge of the officers.

1:33:33But like nobody was even in charge of the military. There was like, I think you had to call it the system of your responsibility that it was like just basically government by committee. Tell me more about that. Why does that lead to mistakes? Well, I can flip around and look at how the West has done it. It's all about, it's supposed to be, and of course there are exceptions, that it's not that it's about you, if you have a particular job, it's that your job gives you certain authority by law to do things. And then we have courts to adjudicate when you in that position, other people think that you've exceeded your authority, and they start suing about different things.

1:34:17And that's how it goes in the West. It's very legalistic, it goes all the way back to the Romans. This is, when I think about what is the West, it's Greek logic, it's Roman law, and then it's these Judeo -Christian moral values. Those are essential pillars of what the West is all about. So in Japan, it's, yeah, they get laws and they westernize, but they have their own indigenous way of dealing with things, and it's very much about different in groups and out groups handling things in whatever the committee is. And so we're going, well, who actually did that? And who's fault is it? Because we have this very legalistic way, and in law, we're going to either put you in jail or whatever.

1:35:03So it's just different ways of organizing ourselves. But we in the West assume, because going back to Roman times, is that institutions are going to be a really big thing, that that's how things are going to work. So then when we get into somewhere like Iraq, and we think the police is going to still be functioning after we blow the government, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's not an institutionalized, it's not an institute. I don't know, I'm no expert, but you're projecting the kind of institutional set up that western countries typically have to other people. They may name these things, the same thing police or whatever, but they may function in very different ways.

1:35:44When you look at the soldiers who fought these hopeless battles, were tens of thousands of them on a single island might starve, or before us into a bonsai charge that they knew was hopeless and they were all going to die, and they knew that they were put in this hopeless situation because of these destructive petty fights between the Navy and the Army, where one of them isn't willing to supply the other one. Why didn't that break their morale in order? Just like, look, we're supposed to die in Comin' Sepulchua, because you guys didn't give us the rights of supplies, because you guys aren't willing to share information or something.

1:36:16Hey, I don't know the answer, because I'm not a social historian, where you would really be doing, oh, I've always, I've done more diplomatic and military, so you're looking top down, but when you're asking is very important question for how the individuals react to all this, and that I do not know the answer, and you'd have to, and there's another piece that makes it hard in Japan, since people don't wanna talk about failure, because it's considered a loss of face, whereas in the West, one of the fundamental assumptions of Christianity is we're all centers, right? Original sin, we're all defective goods from the very beginning, and so there isn't this expectation for perfection, because it's known you're kind of a mess to begin with, and so you can talk about these things, so that's a whole other problem of getting people to open up about truly horrible events, so I don't know the answer, I know that the World War II generation, they came home, they just didn't talk about it with their children, and it just, not a matter for discussion, so I can't answer that of why they follow, but you look at the West in World War I, soldiers would go up and over the trenches, and they knew exactly what was gonna happen to them, and yeah, there were people who didn't, and then they were court -marshalled and shot, a lot of people were shot in World War I, but there's been a change in society about what young men are willing to do before when their officers start telling them, the way the Russians sell this problem in Ukraine with Stalin would do this too, so you send people up ahead, and then you've got the KGB or whatever, the killer unit, so that anyone who tries to go the wrong way in the battlefield, they get machine gunned by their own side, that's one way to get an army to go forward, and that's what Putin is doing right now, and but anyway, it's in more democratic places, people aren't willing to go along with this now, but in the West we did it too.

1:38:15When you're having lunch with your colleagues, with the people who are also experts in this field, and you're discussing, look, what are still the big unresolved questions? We don't understand why this person did X or why events transparent in certain way. What are the big things where you guys have to hassle it out? Oh, well, it's more as someone's decided what the curriculum's gonna be, and oh, and then you teach it, oh, and by the way, as of like six months ago, I've moved to the Maritime History Center, so I'm no longer teaching, so I'm just doing research at this stage. Well, I think the whole point of the curriculum at the war college is to get people out of the operational level, so the junior course is about the strategic effects of operation, it's like, okay, Pearl Harbor, to me, it's an example I'll use, Pearl Harbor, it's an A -plus military operation, they sink everything, of course it's shallow water, and we raise most of it afterwards, they lose nothing, I mean, boy, how can you do a more perfectly choreographed military operation than that one, except it turns an absolute isolationist country to want hell bent coming after Japan, and that would be called a strategic disaster.

1:39:31So you gotta be cautious about your military actions and think about what are the strategic consequences, and it's very difficult to gauge those accurately, so that's one big issue that you need to get at, and then for the seniors, it's okay, great, you're an officer and you understand, if you're an army, you understand about to use armies and the Navy, about how to use Navy's, but how does this integrate with all the other instruments of national power that actually account for how wars turn out, and economics is a huge one, and you'll never, there is no definitive answer in these wars, but rather you can give analytical concepts, and this is my reason for doing these lectures, is to say, hey, don't play half -quart tennis, wouldn't that be a basic thing?

1:40:17Is it gonna provide you the answers if you look at the other side, no it won't, but it'll position you to be in a better shape, or tossing out limited versus unlimited wars, and unlimited wars, or putting people on death ground? Does that answer the question? No, but it goes, okay, if Vladimir Putin has an unlimited objective, vis -a -vis the world order, and he's basically said that he does, then compromising with him would be a mistake on that subject, right, and you're gonna have to deal with him one way or another. So it's, what is it, history isn't over, the great, the long -standing struggle between continental powers that wanna divide the world up into mutually exclusive spheres of influence, and butcher each other over territory, very negative sum, they tend to be very authoritarian, or this maritime order says, hey, surely join the party, follow the rules, you'll make money, right?

1:41:20And this is, I'm gonna let Merkel's thinking this, hey, she was a German chancellor for many years, and she's thinking, Putin, we'll sell them a lot of oil, he'll make money, it's a win -win surely. Well, he's back to his continental stuff, destroying wealth and lives, that's what the alternate world order looks like, is killing people to get things. It's more promising to spread the other one. And this disagreement has gone been going on for a long, long time. I feel like we had a mini version of this debate in the podcast we did a year ago. I have a limited number of ideas. So you're a big one.

1:41:57But if you just said, we can't compromise with people who will have these unlimited goals, like Putin, who have these territorial goals, if we're using the analogy as you're actually making it to Japan during World War II, look what it took, if we wanted to say, we're not gonna compromise with your territorial goals, we will stop you in every way. What it took was a world war that led to an unconditional surrender. So if we're using that analogy, does that imply that no compromise requires some unconditional surrender type of end? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's nothing, there's something that's not...

1:42:31There's something called precision nuclear strike. And it has changed things. During World War II, the United States had sanctuary, which means other people couldn't touch us at home. And our productive base was not touched, and that was essential. There are many things that were essential for allied victory, take any one of them away, and the outcomes different. One of the essential things is this productive base. This time around, all kinds of people can come get the United States. So a lot of times in foreign affairs, you can't solve things. And I don't know who originally said this, but you manage things.

1:43:09And so this is where the sanctions and things come in. You give people a time out from the world already. Don't solve it. You look at North Korea. That is not solved by a long shot, but at least South Korea can go become prosperous. And the North is just sitting with its time out and agreeing more and more malign at home. But it's more like that. It's not recognizing, for instance, conquest. And this is what went on actually when Stalin took over the Baltic States. We never recognized that. In fact, they ran governments in exile based on the funds that they're, I think, oh yeah, there were Baltic States had their funds in US banks.

1:43:56So when Stalin overran them, I think those funds became what funded their embassies. And so in generations later, we recognize their independence. You can't, these things are not solved on anyone's watch. And basically, if you want the things, the way the last Cold War ended is because the Chinese and Russians changed their minds. You have to wait for others to come to their own decisions. What is the track record of sanctions actually changing other people's mind? Because if you look at the world today, unknown. But just to finish the question, well, because you're advocating that as the way we should proceed this is worth asking.

1:44:37If you look at the world today, North Korea, we've sanctioned them for decades. If the idea is we're gonna deprive them of resources to do these bad things, well, there's gonna divert resources from their civilians to the military. Yeah. And you're just making the people poor. You're not changing the government's decisions. Same thing in Iran, same thing in Venezuela. So what are we, we're just like making the people poor. We're not even changing the government's decision. What's the idea here? It's a, you know, I don't know the answer. And I'm working on an edited book with a wonderful colleague who knows much more about economics than I do.

1:45:11And we have all kinds of chapters. This book will not be a good read. But no, because you want to learn things. And so I've done a lot of edited books to learn things on different kinds of naval operations. And then they feed into the books that are more overarching. But this one's on sanctions. And we're in the process of writing the concluding chapter now. And the things that you're bringing up, I don't, I have sanctions don't seem to make people do what you want them to do. And so a lot of people go, well, they don't work. But boy, do they inflict pain. And then of course you're doing it on a usually authoritarian regime that diverts as much of that pain as possible into the civilian population.

1:45:55And then uses that as an excuse to justify its rather brutal role. And I don't have the answer. And the other piece is, so you're dealing with these expansionist powers with a limited toolkit. And the question is which tool to use. And I truly don't have the answer. But what you've mentioned, a really good counter argument. And I've given you an argument. And I don't know which the rebuttal is the better one, honestly. And I think the whole approach is another thing about what you were asking what you were worried about. But here's something to help you with what you're worried about. Is thinking in terms of arguments, counter arguments, and rebuttal.

1:46:37So you have an argument. I have an argument. And on this one, I'm not sure what the rebuttal is. And but it's a good way of thinking about things because it allows you to change your mind. You may well be right. Or I may be right. Or maybe we're right in one country, but another one. I honestly don't know the answer. Yeah. It does seem like one of the biggest things you want to try to figure out in strategy in general. Because if you try to do sanctions, it doesn't seem to work that well. Well, if you try to replace the regime, I mean, people said, like, looks at Am's regime after his invasion in Kuwait.

1:47:12This is somebody who has territorial goals. So we can't have somebody who's going to keep trying to do this in power. You try to replace that. That doesn't work. Well, that worked well. Yeah, right? Yeah. So just like the idea of what do you do with the Rassable regimes? Well, actually, in the Gulf War, Bush senior fought a limited war for a limited objective. The limited objective was get Iraqi troops at a Kuwait, restore the Kuwaiti government. Those are the two really big things. And then call it a day when you've done those things. That's what he did. And it was an incredibly successful war.

1:47:50It went to our heads. So, right? Because when you have it, we're on a successful limited war. It's over very rapidly. You get stuff with not too much costs and it's done. So then we try to do the total makeover of another country and excuse me, what right does one country have to do a total makeover on another country? And then, of course, the Russians and Chinese are apoplectic watching us do this. And that's a problem. Or you think about Afghanistan? Maybe you go in there and you at least boot Osama bin Laden out of the country and then proclaim it victory and leave. All right, going back to Japan.

1:48:27Yeah, okay. I try to defer to you. No, no, I did the diverting. It was interesting. Do we have some sense of what Japanese public opinion was like through the 30s and 40s? I don't know. Okay. And it's also because it's becoming more and more authoritarian. And yeah, I have no idea on that subject. And again, it's a social historian. That would require really detailed knowledge. That I don't know. I had Daniel Jorgon who wrote the prize, which is the Pulitzer Prize winning history of oil. And he has a big section in the book about World War II because in his view, oil was a big component of why the war happened the way it did.

1:49:09And one of the interesting points he made was that he thinks that the Kamikaze missions, a big part of the motivation behind them was that Japan lacked the fuel to have the pilots fly back. Is that accurate? Always worse than that. Oh, they didn't have the fuel to actually train the pilots. And as we learned 9 -11, I'm sorry to bring it back. It's really much easier to learn how to take off a plane and crash it into something, right? That's what those guys were doing. Then it is to teach them how to make safe landings under weird conditions. So the Kamikaze was just an act of, it's guided missile.

1:49:46And it was an act of having very few assets at the end of the war and not enough fuel to fly anyone anywhere. So it's going to be a guided missile into an aircraft carrier or a battleship destroyer or something. One of the things I learned from your book is the overwhelming fraction of deaths on the Japanese side during the war happened after it was known that they were going to lose. I think in the last 14 months, and this is offering a book, at 1 .8 million of the total 2 .1 million Japanese deaths, that's 85 % of the total happened in the last 14 months of the war. And a similar thing is true with Germany, where I think 43 % of the deaths happened in the last year of the war, I think like 2 .3 million out of the 5 .3 million.

1:50:31Walk me through what is going on inside government when the higher level of people must know that they're losing, but they're going to make bigger and bigger sacrifices. Well, you're conflating, I think, Western values about what the purpose of the government is. Well, in commonwealth, commonwheel, commonwheel is common good. And this notion that governments are about the well -being of individuals, okay, well, we're not in societies where we're talking about individuals for openers. Certainly not in Japan. Then there's another one, why the deaths are huge. It's at the end of these wars, you've broken the transportation system that gets produce to hungry mouths, and you've also removed so much manpower literally from the fields you aren't producing anything, so that you're talking about mass starvation as a result of having done a number of previous years of warfare, and also this mass starvation helps account for why one side gets shattered and quits.

1:51:40And then the thing that ought to give everyone pause is, okay, if Japan's economy was, I don't know, a tenth of ours in World War II, and these are the kind of costs that they could inflict, watch it on getting into wars with countries that you think you're vastly superior to. It may not work out the cost of horrific. I mean, you're illustrating the problems with this continental order of taking territories. This is how it goes, but sometimes other people visit wars on you, and then you're into their world of hurt. I think it's like Angela Merkel and Neville Chamberlain back in World War II, who's going, surely these people don't want to do this.

1:52:26It's going to wind up being a bloodbath, surely they don't want this. And Neville Chamberlain makes the compromising Munich, thinking, surely this will be it. We'll compromise them with our own, wrong. They're going to come in for the whole thing. Yeah, I still feel like I don't understand the, what exact, so there's a couple of options, and maybe the correct answer isn't one of these, but one is that they're just denialism. They genuinely do not understand that they are going to lose the war. Another is that, look, they know they're going to lose, but it's better to, like they would prefer to just go out dying then.

1:52:59Well, they're dead anyway, so who cares? Well, this is probably nuclear weapons, push someone to a large corner or a tight enough corner. Maybe they think that, well, it's my last day, so guess what? It's going to be your last day too. How much of a question, the demand for unconditional surrender, knowing that most of the deaths in World War II happened, because, look, if there wasn't an unconditional surrender, maybe we could reach a piece earlier, most of the deaths could have been spared. Oh, I think by the time those deaths are Japanese deaths for us, we're looking at these things, and we've lost a lot of people, and our idea is, hey, we're almost there, and we're not worried about Japanese civilian deaths or Japanese military deaths.

1:53:38We're looking, these are the people that have killed how many Chinese, and I don't believe China was ever part of Japan. What were they doing there? So then you're asking for tender mercies out of Americans, for the Japanese in those days? No. After all that had happened. So yeah, it's ugly. By the time you've killed us many people, the kind of bitterness on both sides. What was it a mistake to demilitarize Japan after the war? Because a couple of things. So one is, look, they did become an ally afterwards, and if they did have a military, they could have helped us in the Korean War. The outcome might have been different, but with military help?

1:54:18Yeah, it was the secret part. Yeah, how do you think? They were the ones who knew about demining. So in the, after, we had a big military drawdown after the end of World War II, and the Navy really got cut back because it was gonna be all nuclear weapons, and the Air Force was gonna deliver, so the Navy didn't get a whole bunch of things that it cared about, including mine sweepers. So when the North Koreans are throwing a lot of mines around, it's Japanese that are helping. It was secret. That's why you don't know about it. It's not your fault. It came out in research, it's recent, and another thing when MacArthur does his in -shine landings, it's very tricky because the ties are, I don't know how many fees, like 30 -foot ties, it's enormous, so you can really get stuck on mud flats if you don't time that right, and if you know where you're going, who are the pilots who bring it all in?

1:55:02It's Japanese. So, and also they did, they've always had a self -defense force, and they have a very competent Navy. It's called a self -defense force, but anybody else would call it a Navy, but that then fits in with what the Constitution says we're supposed to have. So, but why is it a mistake to demilterize Japan? Another reason is they had a vested interest in making sure the communists don't take over in China, and so they could have provided some amount of support. If the nationalists, obviously the nationalists are going to lose, at that point maybe they would have decided to support the nationalists against the communists.

1:55:39It's too late. They've got it the nationalist armies that was a massive strategic error on the J. And part of it comes from arrogance of, don't denigrate the other side. And so, the Japanese thought they could, China's a failed state. These people are hopeless. They came to decide what they're doing. They got warlords everywhere. Will just push them around and we'll get what we want. And they do really well moving to Manchuria. Manchuria is bigger than Germany and France combined. The Japanese actually stabilize it, do lots of investment. That's why it becomes the most industrialized part of Asia outside the home islands, more so than Shanghai.

1:56:21And this is in the 30s. And so they're looking at the things look pretty good and they'll get away with it. And they didn't. Let's say in a couple of decades before the war, if you looked at somebody who's young and ambitious in Japan, the kind of person who might come to Silicon Valley today if they're in America, what do they want to do? Do they want to join Zybatsu? Do they want to become a general of the military? This is social history. I just don't know. And you don't see a lot. Well, yeah, I just truly don't know. It has to do with, there's so much to know in this world that all of us, all we can do is know a corner of it.

1:57:02So my corner has been a top down. And actually, if my expertise, I started out with a major field in Russian history and a minor field in Chinese history. And then I realized to deal with those two, you had to understand Japan. So you asked me in my week suit about the social history of that country, and I can't answer it. My friend, Edgar Dool has a theory that, look, you have the, many of the powers that we fought in the 20th century, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, not fought directly, but at least fought over, we ended up becoming allies with them later on. And in fact, there's some of our best allies.

1:57:40So there's two ways to think about it. One is that we had especially good diplomacy with them after the war. The second is that despite having the same interests, despite being in a position where we should naturally have been friends for, we basically screwed up the diplomacy beforehand. And we didn't ally ourselves with the peaceful factions within these countries. Basically, illustrates a failure of diplomacy on our part that the natural allies, we weren't, we ended up going to wars with. There's no matter of diplomacy is going to solve Hitler. So that one is, one of the lessons is, don't let the world global economy melt down.

1:58:21And when that happens, people who are not only Americans will get desperate when that happens, but people who are poorer than Americans, which is lots of the world, will be truly desperate. So you don't want to do that. As for why the Japanese and the Germans are such wonderful allies as they are, is a, what's the word? It's a testament to having a generous peace. So the peace after that war was not to get even, which is what had been the peace in World War I. Was the Germans had done all this terrible stuff. We're gonna make them pay all kinds of money and we're gonna tell them it was all their fault and blah, blah, blah.

1:59:02That doesn't work well. But rather the peace, that was of course what the Russians did to the East Germany, but for West Germany, it's how you reintegrate them back into Europe and get them back on in it. And the Japanese as well. And also a serendipitous fact of the Korean War, the Japanese economy was a total mess at the end of this war. And the United States of course is overtaxed because there's Europe to rebuild and there isn't enough money to do everything. But when the Korean War hits, which is immediately in 1950, tons of the supplies were bought in Japan and that's how the Japanese economy initially was restored as through the Korean War and then the Vietnam War because it's the local place to buy or more local the United States to buy a lot of supplies.

1:59:52So that's another piece of why things work out. And then there's also the Germans and Japanese who live through, you were asking about, oh, what do conscripts think? There are two brilliant generations in Japan's modern history and one's the Magee generation and the other's the post -World War II generation that did this incredible makeover. And I think all these wonderful high quality products they built, like I love my Toyota. I'm going to rent an American car and say, I can't find anything. I'm going to kill everyone as I'm trying to figure out how to adjust something where it's Toyota, it's like, and we're good.

2:00:37When you were showing the things we learned from the diary entries of different animals and generals on the Japanese side, as you were going through the archives and looking at these things, I'm curious if, were they writing knowing that they were writing for future historians or was that actually just a personal record keeping thing or what was the motivation behind that? I did not read that stuff in archives. Japanese archives, I was doing strictly diplomatic stuff. The Admiral Ogaki Matamai's diary, which is the one thing I cited on these subjects, it was translated, someone ran into it, it was translated into English, and so I just read the whole thing.

2:01:18And then the other stuff, the quotations, I think I was ripping off secondary sources where someone else had done the archival research and then I pulled those, but those were the quotations came from. So again, I haven't done this deep read into all of the Japanese thinking about all of these, what motivated them in their careers that I've not done? Was there some big aha moment when you're going through all this Japanese stuff where I get why they did certain, like white certain things transpired and certain, well, this lecture, when I came to the Naval War College in 2000, they assigned me a couple of lectures because it's a group taught class and everyone only gives two, three, four lectures.

2:02:13And so I was junior, I think I got one or two. And so I was told to lecture on World War II Pacific and I'm like, oh great, US Navy, this will be a joke, me telling them about World War II Pacific, right, because I'm a historian, major field rush, I'm a minor field China and I've dabbled in Japan and now I'm supposed to talk about this. And so my husband said, well, hey, I've taught this survey of Japan, read this Bouchido stuff and he had some of the books hanging around the house. So I read that and then I had read some basic things about World War II and then I just, this is why I'm telling you, I think it's a useful way to approach other cultures is read what they read, what are the key books and apparently these were key books.

2:03:02And then you go, okay, if I believe this, then I'm gonna take Western analysis, it's going rather than mirror imaging, I'm gonna basically take their software, put it in here and my brain and then say, okay, does this inform me of what they're doing in the bonsai charges? And I was like, oh yeah, that actually makes sense now. Instead of saying, what are these nut jobs doing? And it's everyone. It's, no, no, actually if you believe these things, then this would explain how you're doing things. So that's how that all came about. One thing I was wondering about when you were talking about the inter -service rivalries is how, what were the allies doing that they avoided this?

2:03:47Not only between the branches of the military, but I mean, allies, the word literally says that they had to coordinate between, Japan wasn't coordinating with Germany in the way that America was coordinated with Britain. What were, like, what, how were the institutions set up or the culture set up that made this possible? The last. A, this institutional rivalries terrible all over the place, but there's another, more concepts that are useful. So it's really helpful in looking at people when you have disagreements with them is, who is their primary adversary or rival? Not their secondary, but they have probably a whole list of people who annoy them, but who's the number one?

2:04:24And then, where is the primary theater of whether that disagreement is? Look at that. And then on the disagreement, how big a deal is it? Is it existential? Japan thought, the reason was undeterrable that we didn't figure out. They thought their entire existence was at stake, that they absolutely had to have territory in China to survive. And now, whether that's correct or not is a completely different story. If they believe it, that's what's motivating them. So on these, when you're looking at the war on the Allied side, who's the primary enemy? Hitler. Where is the primary theater? Germany, even though there's Japan, it was Germany first.

2:05:13And what about the ultimate goals? Well, actually, that doesn't align at all, but because the Russians want a communist wonderland, we want everyone decolonized, and the British want the empire of which the Sun never sets, but they all shared an intermediate objective the Hitler has to go. And that's a superglue of an alliance. Now, let's look at, flip it to the access. Okay, Italy. What does Italy want? Roman Empire, whatever it is. So who's the primary enemy? Well, Britain, because that's where Britain's interests are. Okay, Hitler, what's he all about? He wants to do his labours around, Nazi wonderland all over Eurasia.

2:05:52So who's his primary enemy? That would be Russia. Japan, what do they want? They want the big Japanese empire, who's their primary enemy? It's China. And then when they get us in, they got a whole new problem in their hands. None of this aligns. And so the access aren't going to be trading many resources with each other, whereas the allies, and it's really, it goes back to your original question about the British. Part of their way of running wars is you absolutely coordinate with allies. You give them serious resources, which is what they finally figured out at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, where they're paying big money to support different allies.

2:06:33And then you've got to put skin in the games, actually, senior armies. So the British and we take this from them, we're students of the British on this. The massive sharing with Len Lee's. And Stalin isn't sharing too much with us. And then we've got the unified commands with the British because they're all about doing that. The Russians won't even let us on their territory to do things. And they're only little bits with the Arctic convoy is going up to Merman, and it's hardly anyone who's up there. So this is a different cultural tradition and how to deal with things. All right, we come full circle.

2:07:12I think that's a great place to close things. This was excellent. Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you for coming.

2:07:21Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, please consider watching the other two episodes in this series with Sarah, the former one on India and how the USSR, US, China, Pakistan all fought over India during the Cold War. And the next one is about how Mao unified a continent and ultimately caused the greatest catastrophes in human history. If you're interested in sponsoring this podcast, go to thewarkeshpatel .com slash advertise to learn more. Otherwise, it's super helpful if you just share it with people who you think might enjoy it, send it on your group chats, social media friends.

2:08:03It's all very helpful. All right, I'll see you on the next one. Cheers.