Post facto criticisms

From Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn about the Enemy by John Keegan.

There is an argument at times made that Japan's entry into World War II was a consequence of US diplomatic and economic actions in the late 1930s. This is an argument made on the part of a segment of intelligentsia who have a visceral reaction against broad American success and accomplishments and who will always make absurd arguments to allay their own foolishness. Not infrequently there are nuggets of truth in their otherwise untruthful arguments. Just enough to lend credibility to an otherwise meritless argument. Other than misrepresentation, selective representation, the most common trick among this particular crowd is to omit context.

Yes, the US had an oil embargo on Imperial Japan in the late 1930s but this was tied to Japanese militarization and to imperial Japanese territorial conquests (and corresponding massacres).

Keegan is not addressing this particular argument but his discussion in chapter six, Midway: The Complete Intelligence Victory? provides some of the missing context to the argument about the weight of US responsibility for the course of Japan's actions. Japan was pursuing its own military interests without real engagement at either the economic or diplomatic levels. When this happens, what are the effective tools that can be wielded by a correspondent party, such as the US, other than the threat of military violence? It is nice to assume that everyone shares the same goals, objectives, assumptions, values, etc. But when it is obvious that those are not shared, what becomes the appropriate course of action?

Although the outcome of the FIrst World War made Japan a Pacific oceanic power, both its domestic and external affairs after 1919 and until the late thirties were concerned almost exclusively with China. For centuries, even millennia, China's cultural subordinate, Japan by the twentieth century had determined that its future lay in a reverse subordination, economic but also political and military, of China to its imperial needs. In 1915 Japan had issued a set of "twenty-one demands" which required China to concede rights and privileges to Japan, according it overlord status. The Chinese prevaricated and resisted, as far as they were able. In 1931 they were forced, however, to submit to effective Japanese annexation of Manchuria and then in 1937 to a full-scale Japanese invasion of the south. The nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek withdrew inland, first to the city of Nanking, then to Chungking. Its capacity to resist was hampered by the attacks of the Chinese Communist Party armies under Mao Tse-tung.

Japan's imperial policy was strengthened and furthered during the 1930s by the rise of an intense nationalist spirit within its military class, particularly in the army. The "Manchuria Incident" of 1931 was largely the work of nationalist officers, in the Manchuria garrison. The "China Incident," so-called by American observers, of 1937 in Shanghai was equally an outburst of ill-discipline by the Japanese occupying troops. By that date, however, the army led the government, which had escaped from the control of constitutional statesmen. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Japan, then in alliance with Germany and Italy, was a totalitarian state, committed to an imperialist programme of territorial expansion directed against China, with which it was in full-scale war, the Asian possessions of the European empires, principally Britain and the Netherlands, and the United States.

The war on the mainland of China consumed most of the strength of the Japanese army, which fielded twenty-five divisions. Militarily it was far superior to that of the Republic of China, which survived total defeat only by its ability to use space as a means of defence. The Japanese were not able to penetrate far beyond the coastal provinces, though as those contained China's larger cities and main rice-growing areas, they had little strategic reason for mounting deeper offensives.

The Japanese navy was scarcely involved in the China war, which had no marine dimensions. It was, nevertheless, much concerned with the strategic future since Japan's attack on China had provoked the wrath of the United States, manifested in a series of increasingly constrictive trade embargoes. Japan, like Britain, lacked the domestic resources necessary to support an imperial policy. Its home islands did not produce enough food to support its population, which relied heavily on imports of rice, while its industries and infrastructure required large imports of metal ores, scrap and oil. By 1941, after Japan's deployment of troops into French Indo-China, enforced on the defeated Vichy government, an initiative which directly threatened British Malaya, the American oil and metal embargoes were seriously hampering Japan's ability to sustain its manufacturing output. America's intention was to restrain Japan's military ambitions. The effect was to drive Japan towards aggressive war.

So Japan has a declared and escalating program of territorial conquest. Diplomacy is not working. Do economic embargoes such as oil and metal hurt or help the cause of peace? In effect, they brought the conflict to a head, first delaying, and then accelerating the race to war. The US government and diplomatic corps were in the position, much as we are today with ISIS, of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

As a civilized, conflict-avoiding society (Europe as well), you seek to exercise all the levers of diplomacy and economics to stem the course of an enemy who has a completely different set of precepts, goals and considerations. There is no good answer, just answers with greater or lesser degrees of probability of success and which in hindsight will be deemed as having been inadequate or inflammatory.

In her masterpiece, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman says that

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

Much as I admire Tuchman as a gifted author and historian, I think this strips the challenge of its complexity. She identifies four kinds of misgovernment (tyranny or oppression, excessive ambition, incompetence or decadence, and folly or perversity) and dedicates her book to the investigation of folly or perversity.

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-­productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age. “Nothing is more unfair,” as an English historian has well said, “than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.” To avoid judging by present-­day values, we must take the opinion of the time and investigate only those episodes whose injury to self-­interest was recognized by contemporaries.

Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.

I think it estimable for her to try and create rigor to her process but I am doubtful of its success.

To those arguing that the US exacerbated the circumstances leading to war, they could argue that 1) there were those at the time arguing that embargoes were counter-productive, 2) there were feasible alternatives (such as appeasement, "if we give them Manchuria, perhaps they will be satisfied and we will avoid a regional conflagration") and 3) the issue of an expansionist Japan extended beyond a single administration, the rise of Japan being an issue at least since their defeat of Russia in 1905.

There is a class of problems for which there are no clear directly causal solutions (I do X and Y is always the outcome). Instead, there are infinite recursive feedback loops, unknown goals and priorities, interpretations of fragmentary evidence, etc. The decision for action (or non-action) has to be taken but any decision is endlessly wrapped in caveats, asterisks, and unverifiable assumptions.

It is not that there is a definitive answer that can be known. All you can guaranty is whether there was a sufficiently robust, rigorous, open process of consideration of the courses of action.

"Any fool", as Churchill, the amateur brick-layer, once said of a critical comment about his crooked brick wall, "can see what is wrong, it takes a genius to see what is right."

When considering some pivotal decision which produced a result that was less than desirable, such as the avoidance of war through embargoes, perhaps the right approach is not to look for the mechanistic cause-and-effect steps between decision and outcome. Once the outcome is known, then the initiating decision can always be held accountable for producing less than desired outcomes.

The challenge is to maintain the frame of reference of chances and probabilities holding at the time before the outcome could be known. Under that regime, you have to ask what were the reasonable alternatives known and knowable at the time and what were the spreads of probability associated with each possible course of action.

This is emotionally less satisfactory because what it will often reveal is that at the time of the decision, there were several courses of reasonable action within some acceptable range of probability of success. Just because you chose course of action A over course of action B and A produced bad results, does not mean that the choice was either foolish or unwarranted.

Sometimes decisions are inherently difficult and all five reasonable courses of action might also all have an inescapably high probability of failure.