On Feb 25, 3:41 pm, " wrote:
On Feb 25, 2:42 pm, Jeff Dougherty

It doesn't even have to be emotion, either- when you're leading a
country, the economic is just one of the dimensions you have to
contend with. Take the U.S. and Japan in the years just before WWII:
Japan imported much more from the U.S. than she exported, and from a
strictly economic point of view the best thing might have been to let
Japan's campaign of conquest in Asia go on. Most of the things Japan
was importing were manufactured goods as opposed to raw materials,
with the exception of a few things like bauxite that weren't really
present in the territories under attack anyway, so absent any U.S.
interference it's likely that trade deficit would have increased, if
anything, to feed Japan's war effort. From a strict making-money
point of view, the thing to do would be to let Japan grab what it
could- but the political consequence would have been accepting
Japanese hegemony in Eastern Asia, which was unacceptable to the U.S.
There are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in
economics texts.

-JTD

Wait a second ...

This ahistorical drivel needs to be corrected, and fast.

WW2 wasn't simply a clash of Empire.

Despite the best efforts of various revisionsists, the reality was
that WW2 pitted various democracies (in spite of all the imperfections
of each) against totalitarian regimes that posited racial superiority
as validation of their claims.


snip

I think we may be in violent agreement here. :-)

The point I was trying to make was that wars happen for many, many
reasons, and that national leaders have to consider many, many
different dimensions when they're making decisions. Reducing the
entire thing to economics, as the poster I was initially replying to
did, is a dangerous oversimplification. All I was doing with that
part of my post is illustrating my point by looking at *one* of the
other dimensions that led to war between the U.S. and the Japanese
Empire in the Pacific. I did not mean to suggest that there weren't
any others, or that politics alone could explain the war any more than
economics could, or that the Pacific War was a "clash of Empire".
(For one thing, it's a bit hard to have a "clash of Empire" when one
party is in the process of giving up its empire in the area, as the
U.S. was doing at the time WWII kicked off.) There are a lot of other
dimensions that I could have picked, and many more if I wanted to look
at the Japanese decision to attack the U.S. I was just making a point
about the causes of war in general, and the dangers of looking at one
particular factor as the end all and be all.

As a side note, I would agree with you that anyone who says the U.S.
and Japan were ideologically equivalent at the time simply hasn't done
the reading.

-JTD