In 1941, Imperial Japan understood perfectly well that it would be stupid to pick a fight with yet another superpower. They attacked anyway because Japan had essentially no choice. Japan had and has no domestic supply of oil, which means that the US more or less cut off their blood supply by embargoing oil imports from usual sources such as Indonesia. Barring preemptive retreat and surrender, Japan had no strategic option that did not involve knocking the US Navy out of the Western and Southern Pacific.
Anyhow, if oil does switch from a commodity to a strategic resource then everyone becomes Japan!
Here’s a cat that adopted a puppy.
celticdragonchick
Japan could have stopped her genocidal war of domination in China which was mostly the reason for the oil and steel embargo to begin with.
Linda Featheringill
Oh, goody! Another century of war!
And that is just the battle over oil. Wait until people start fighting over water.
I do have a question, though. The folks on the right who are so resistant to the changes in the political scene, how are they going to deal with running out of oil?
joestork
Bullsh*t!
I see no evidence that the cat has “adopted” the puppy.
It’s just toleranting having its face chewed on.
Culture of Truth
It’s not a strategic resource now?
joestork
@ Linda Feathergill
It’s simple — starts with a “t” and ends with a “he apocalpsye”.
That’s why they have to not be in office ever again.
NonyNony
@Linda Featheringill:
I can tell you they won’t follow the gist of celticdragonchick’s advice above and get out of Afghanistan. They won’t be averse to starting all new wars to get more oil either.
Tim F.
@celticdragonchick: Yes, as I pointed out in a four-sentence paragraph. Considered from the perspective of decisionmakers in Tokyo, it is irrelevant that we consider their project bad and evil. They didn’t. What matters here is that most countries on Earth will find themselves in a comparable strategic position. Those that can will likely make similar decisions about whether to give up on their own projects (or their existence as a modern state).
Pigs & Spiders
Huh?
Downpuppy
We can only hope we don’t do something criminally insane like invading & occupying Iraq.
BR
@Linda Featheringill:
Nah, it won’t last that long. The best estimates I’ve seen put world oil production at 2030 at maybe 1/4 of what it is today. That means there won’t even be enough oil to run most of the military apparatus that would be used to secure the oil, let alone to make the wars worth the energy expenditure.
Amanda in the South Bay
Is there a link to something that I’m missing here? Does this have to do with that German report linked to here recently?
I suppose, just to inject some snark, that the German military sorta dropped the ball with regards to its world famous Teutonic anal style of analysis when they decided to fuck up the logistics of invading the Soviet Union.
Anyways, not everyone in Japan correctly noted that they’d be crushed by declaring war on the US-quite of a few of them believed their own propaganda.
Pancake
What an extremely unusual post with even stranger rationales! Starting the weekend a little early with a bucket full of exotic beers??
Culture of Truth
How do you say “cakewalk” in Japanese?
Todd
Best. Entry. Ever.
NonyNony
@BR:
You are forgetting nuclear powered tanks.
Do you really think the war machine will allow a little thing like an oil shortage to stop it? War is one of the oldest human activities on the planet. We had war before we had oil, and once the planet is sucked dry of oil we’ll still have war.
If it had to, the war machine would roll out solar powered tanks to continue its fight. But it won’t, because nuclear powered tanks will be better.
And don’t think that the fact that strapping a nuclear reactor into a tank is a really, really fucking bad idea let you think that it won’t be done. If the choice is nuclear powered tanks or no war, there will be nuclear fucking powered tanks. Maybe someone will come up with a better idea so that war can continue without sending a nuclear reactor into a war zone. But only ideas that allow wars to continue to be fought will be entertained. There’s always someone willing to build the tank.
SRW1
Doesn’t that explain why Dick Cheney & friends are so mightily pissed by the idea of the US leaving Iraq?
Poopyman
I really appreciated the Cheerful Note of the Day, Tim, but then you fucked it up with a puppy.
Poopyman
Fixed.
Poopyman
@BR:
Yay! The return of square riggers! With nukes!
liberal
@celticdragonchick:
Yes and no.
Yes, Western powers didn’t want Japan to expand its empire.
No, it had nothing to do with Japanese brutality, and everything to do with Western powers wanting to control for themselves the regions that Japan was expanding into.
El Cid
@celticdragonchick: Actually, the US acted against Japanese assets and resources not with direct regard to Japan’s assault on China and its population, but Japanese incursion into Indochina. That’s why the embargo was placed in July of 1941, and not in 1938.
liberal
@BR:
I thought the US military was working on making oil from algae to help secure supply for the future.
TJ
@Linda Featheringill:
Nah. As a country, we decided to live fast, die young and leave an ugly corpse.
WereBear
The way they handle everything else; a big fat noisy tantrum, then blaming oppressed minorities who have no power in the equation, then stealing the remainder in a way that makes maximum profit and suffering, then complaining about “what you made me do.”
Ya know, just because they want an abusive relationship doesn’t mean we have to let them have one. But we never seem to learn.
TJ
@liberal:
They are looking at biodiesel, but God himself doesn’t have enough money to pay for what the fuel would cost from the typical military contractor.
scav
@WereBear:
Immediately followed by claims, nay, boastful assertions! that they were the original ones warning about the situation, look! it’s right in their name CONSERVatives!
WereBear
LOL!
But, of course, in a sad, ironic, way.
El Cid
I guess one of my comments vanished for being too long or something.
SRW1
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Think that’s only a Japanese or Teutonic disease?
Slowbama
Max Hasting’s Retribution does a great job detailing the extent of Japanese atrocity in China and southeast Asia in the decade prior to Pearl Harbor. Any discussion of Japanese motives and mindset during World War II is incomplete without a thorough examination of their pathology in this regard. Their genocidal behavior was every bit on a par with the Nazis, though somewhat less industrial in nature.
El Cid
@Slowbama: They were tried pretty similar as the Nazis, and many of them hanged by the Tribunal (and many more by other governments).
Sure, for purposes of propaganda the Japanese imperialists could talk about “Asia”, but it was never as if they much liked the actual other Asians.
El Cid
GOD FUCKING DAMNIT! Can I not god-damned quote from the official diplomatic record of the US State Department without it being fucking banned by moderation?
Linda Featheringill
@El Cid:
Sympathy for your troubles. You are right. You should be able to make that quote without the moderation Nazi giving you a hard time.
WereBear
@Slowbama: Durn ya! Another book goes on the wish list…
Alwhite
Suggested but not stated above: Didn’t this war start in 2003? We are already fighting to control the assets necessary to fight the wars to come.
Regardless of the morality of their action the actual requirement for the return of oil supplies would have been to cede control of the Pacific to the US. If I were Japan I would not have wanted to pay that price.
Nathanlindquist
Somehow the German military peak oil report has gotten way more attention than the, um, American military peak oil report. (see page 24) http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf
The US military calmly buries the statement that we will likely have severe oil shortages by 2015. Five years from now. Gas lines. The 70s all over again.
Am I crazy to think that this is something the press should maybe cover? but after their stellar performance prior to recent disasters like the Iraq War and the financial crisis I should be less shocked by the incompetence.
Also, if you are the environmental movement and trying to pass a renewable energy bill, wouldn’t noting that the US military believes oil shortages are imminent help your cause?
But seriously, outside of the peak oil blogs, I have not seen this report mentioned on even one blog, and the only american newspaper was the Miami Herald.
Brachiator
@Tim F.:
And this is different from the status quo how? Countries that are strong militarily will use whatever means they can to secure access to oil and equivalent resources if that is the easy way out.
And if the situation with respect to peak oil is as dire as people think, then there will be a strong incentive to look for or to develop a reliable and plentiful alternative. But this does not necessarily mean that any country would put a priority on developing a clean resource, especially if the costs were perceived to be excessive.
And it would be really interesting to see China and a re-militarized Japan compete for oil resources against each other and against the US, Europe, Brazil, India and whatever other country decided to step up to the plate.
brendancalling
@Tim F.:
tim thanks for this, and thanks for yesterday’s post on peak oil. not sure if you clicked on the links in the NY Times piece, but one of the commenters linked to the 2010 Joint Operations Enviroment report (warning, pdf), which noted on page 29:
it’s not only the german army that recognizes this, it’s our own armed services as well. Wonder when the general populace gets a memo?
Bruce Webb
Come on Tim, that’s pure revisionism. Japan had a clear program of trying to dominate East Asia since at least the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. And for a power that was reluctant to take on the U.S. it had kind of a remarkeable lineup of Aircraft Carriers and Battleships in place before the war, a fleet that was totally disproportionate to British, Dutch and Australian Asian fleets combined. Those 18″ guns on those Battleships were not designed to be used on cruises up the Yellow River, instead the Japanese Imperial Fleet was designed from top to bottom to engage the U.S. in a traditional deep blue Naval conflict. I mean it is not like they just stuck a cannon on a fishing boat or a flat deck on a freighter and struck at Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese conquered Korea and Manchuria, had troops in China proper, and had designs on Indonesian oil years and years prior to 1941, claiming that U.S. and Dutch pushback in the form of restricted oil supplies was the actual casus belli is some weird combination of apologism for Japan couple with some Roosevelt bashing (as in FDR knew Pearl Harbor was coming and welcomed the attack). All in all this line is on the same level as Trutherism.
Sentient Puddle
Also on a cheerful note, Brad DeLong has fun with Google Instant.
Still works as of a minute ago.
grumpy realist
There’s a reason why the LDP has been pushing nukes ever since 1955, y’know. And why METI has had a “go nukes!” attitude since day one.
Which is why anything to do with biodiesel in Japan is under MAFF…
(I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation back in the late 1990s and discovered that if one were to launch solar power satellites (a la Peter Glaser) using US launch vehicles and then beam the power back down to Japan and sell it at Japanese energy prices, the whole system was actually cost-effective, but I was never able to interest the powers-that-be on it…)
RP
Ridiculous. First, you didn’t point that out in your initial post. Second, the motives and morality of the decision makers in Tokyo are obviously relevant to their decision to start a war with the US. You’re saying that, over the next few decades, most countries will be in a similar position to Japan in 1941, and I don’t see any support for that claim.
Amanda in the South Bay
@SRW1
of course not, but that’s not what the OP is about.
Yamamoto’s famous quote about having only a year to fight the Americans aside, there were plenty of delusional Japanese who had their own racial versions of manifest destiny.
Which is why I thought the wanking of the German mitaries analytical ability yesterday to be hilarious,(not because I think pw isn’t a problem-AGW and peak oil are the two biggest problems of the future) but because the most famous German Army miscalculation was the bungling of the logistics of invading Russia.
celticdragonchick
@liberal:
No. Japanese atrocities in China were very public and noted in the US media. They played a direct role in getting support for ‘curbing Japanese aggression’.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
Yes, although that likely constituted the straw that broke the camels back. Sentiment had been building against Japan for some time.
celticdragonchick
@Bruce Webb:
The Imperial Japanese Fleet order of battle was definitely meant to take on the American fleet, although the Japanese kept trying to replay the “single decisive battle” narrative that they won with against the Russians in 1905.
El Cid
@celticdragonchick: I wouldn’t suggest that there were[n’t] all kinds of sentiments against the Japanese government in the US, both politically and popularly. Their crimes in China, however, weren’t what made US officials choose to take these strong and isolating economic/military actions.
It’s like the invasion of Iraq. The US didn’t invade and occupy Iraq because of Saddam’s crimes against his own people. They invaded because Bush Jr. and Cheney and the warhawk brigades wanted to for a variety of desired gains. But it’s always easier when you have a real evil foe to war against.
You don’t have to — we gladly slaughtered tens of thousands of Central Americans and Southern Africans without having any really big enemies, as much as the hawks and liberal hawks tried to puff up Ortega.
handy
Yeah yeah yeah we’re all burnin’ the world’s coming to an end yada yada yada…but I just HAD to link that video on FB!
Nemo_N
Reading this thread makes me even more certain that, in the future, the prevalent line about the Iraq Invasion will be “SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS BRUTAL THEREFORE WE HAD TO STOP HIM”.
It’s depressing.
El Cid
@Nemo_N: I’m more depressed because the next time someone’s ginning up a new war, opposition pointing out how dangerous this is for both we the attacker and the civilians attacked will be faced with WE LEARNED HOW TO DO THIS RIGHT WITH THE SURGE NOW SHUT UP BECAUSE THE SURGE WORKED.
Doug M.
I’m sorry, Tim, but that’s just wrong.
Japan’s military — above all, its Navy — needed oil. But its civilian economy did not. Japanese industry ran on coal, and its cities were lit with a combination of coal and hydropower. In the civilian economy, oil was used only for transportation — and at a per capita rate roughly a tenth that of the contemporary US.
Japan’s civilian economy needed so little oil that they could run on imports from Soviet North Sakhalin (which continued uninterrupted until 1945).
So the US oil embargo did no significant harm to “Japan”. But it was a huge finger in the eye to the Japanese /military/.
Doug M.
El Cid
@Doug M.: The United States cited as one of its reasons for viewing Nicaragua as strategically important were its reserves of bismuth, which most prominently is used for Pepto-Bismol and Kaopectate. Regimes’ estimates of strategic resources aren’t simply based on what a civilian population needs.
bjacques
An alternative to nuclear- or solar-powered tanks!
Odie Hugh Manatee
I like the idea of powering them with a massive rubber band and having a giant wind-up key hanging off the back of the tank. That sure would make war games interesting! The same idea can be applied to airplanes though the wind-up key can also act as the tail.
celticdragonchick
@El Cid:
You seem to be mistaking the motives of a liberal (very) administration (Roosevelt) with those of today’s right wing neo colonialists. I don’t think you can really conflate the two in terms of foreign policy aims or even basic moral understandings.
Trying to explain the rationals of people in the past through modern political calculation is nearly always a mistake.
Roosevelt and much of the American populace at the time saw things through a certain moral prism that we do not have at this time, and Japanese actions violated American sensibilities.
Tony J
Well, no. What he appears to be saying is that the sanctions the US enforced on Japan put the regime in Tokyo in a position where oil went from a commodity they could buy to a resource they had to take. Come peak-oil, every nation on the planet that doesn’t have sufficient oil-reserves of its own will be in the same situation as Japan in late 1941. How they respond to being in that position will depend on the nature of the regime in power, as it did back in 1941.
Then, Japan didn’t need the oil to exist, but it did need the oil to keep its massive naval fleet in action, and the people making the decisions in Tokyo were Naval officers who believed that Japan’s status as a ‘superpower’ rested on her ability to control the seas around her. They were right, strategically speaking, which is why the US imposed the sanctions in the first place.
So any nation that has superpower pretentions is potentially going to react to peak-oil much like the Japanese did in 1941, they’re going to do what they think they have to do to ensure that the oil keeps flowing. Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, isn’t something to look forward to.
Anne Laurie
@NonyNony:
__
Remember the apocryphal story where some bureaucrat asked Einstein to predict what kind of amazing super-scienterrific weapons America would use when “we” fought World War III?
Einstein said he didn’t know about WW3, but he would confidently predict that the state-of-the-art weaponry during WW4 would be… rocks and sticks.
El Cid
@celticdragonchick: @celticdragonchick: I’m not making such a mistake. Although the moderation wouldn’t let it appear, I quoted the actual text of of the memo of the discussions between (Acting) Secretary of State Sumner Welles and British Ambassador on July 10th of 1941 as to why the US was considering the embargo of Japan. It was simply not because of Japanese actions in China, except to the degree that such activities suggested their intentions and patterns of efforts.
They were explicitly planning these economic actions if Japan moved on Indochina. It was in no way triggered at that point in time because of Japanese atrocities in China.
You can find this document in the official State Department declassified records of US foreign policy (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941, Pre-hostilities with Japan) at the mentioned date. I can’t link otherwise I’m filtered out.
It doesn’t matter if the politician is liberal or neo-colonial: if the actual empirical evidence of their words and writings among themselves, not as public PR, reveal different motives than you would prefer to assume. To re-interpret history according to the labels and presumed moral intentions of various politicians is simply to reject the actual available evidence.
Believe it or not, I’m quite aware of what FDR’s political inclinations were, and this has nothing to do with this issue.
Tim F.
@Tony J: That’s it. Certainly there were levels of survival that Japan might have been prepared to accept. However, they could not keep their dreams afloat (so to speak) without ending the US embargo on oil. Peak oil means that virtually everyone will have to choose between scrapping their dreams for hand farming tools, or taking what someone else does not want to give.
El Cid
@Tim F.: There was a time when the US could provide its domestic petroleum needs through its own production, but it’s not as if the government would permit an oil embargo on any imports without military action. Even though it wasn’t at the time directly and viciously slaughtering and raping tens or hundreds of thousands of people in other lands. Or hiring the Indonesian military to overthrow the President and slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, because that would come later.
Andy K
@El Cid:
Uhm, no.
Bruce Webb touched on it earlier without quite getting there: In 1938 the Imperial Navy was ready to fight, but the US was not. The third of the Yorktown class carriers- the USS Hornet- wasn’t launched until October of 1941. The USS Essex- the first of the Essex class- didn’t launch until the summer of 1942. The USN feared a surface-to-surface encounter between its Missouri class battleships (16″ guns) and the Japanese Yamato class battleships (18″ guns)…And the US knew well that if there was a war with Japan, there’d also be a war with Germany, so a big chunk of the fleet would be used in the Atlantic.
That said, I still can’t figure out why the Japanese pilots, on their attack on Pearl Harbor, would bomb a whole lotta ships that were quickly on their way to obsolescence and leave the fuel depots unscathed.
JWL
If oil is denied America, let us resolve to kill every motherfuckin’ living piece of skin that stands between us and it.
Or (just) maybe work something else out…
…chirp…chirp…chirp….
OK. I ran it up the flagpole, and nobody saluted.
I Got It!
Let’s invade Iraq.. no,no I mean Iran….
Redhand
@ Tim F
Seriously, this is perhaps the stupidest post I have ever seen on B-J. Abstruse doesn’t even begin to describe it.
WTF are you trying to say? That FDR was wrong to embargo Japan? That the USA deserved the Pearl Harbor attack?
That we were like Japan in invading Iraq? Is that it!?
Look, invading Iraq was a criminal act of aggression by a lawless President, m’kay? But it’s sophomoric to buy into the “no blood for oil” bullshit as a sole casus belli. That may have been one reason, but the Bushies’ grandiosity and delusion about remaking the Middle East into compliant “democracies” that wouldn’t threaten Israel, while opening the oil spigots for us, had much more of teh crazy to it than petroleum products. And it sure as hell wasn’t a US version of The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. To even suggest such a comparison is really losing your sh*t on the ole self-hate Cool-Aide.
Stick with current events Tim. That’s where you make sense.
frosty
@NonyNony: An Einstein quote seems germane here:
“I don’t know how World War III will be fought, but WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Viva Brisvegas
The great what-if here, is what would have happened had Japan struck south into SE Asia and grabbed the Indonesian oil fields without first striking at Pearl Harbour and by bypasssing the Phillipines.
Almost certainly the US would have done nothing to protect British, French and Dutch colonial interests, and Japan would have secured its oil and rubber supply, making any US embargo pointless.
Germany would not have declared war on the US, so the US stays out of WWII in any meaningful sense. It would then have taken an extra 3 or 4 years for the Soviets to defeat the Nazis at the cost of another 20 million or so lives. Britain would have been even more utterly bankrupted by the war and turned into the sick man of a sick Europe.
So why did Japan attack the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour? Because it could. It had a Navy designed for just such a role and the military went looking for a nail on which it could use this very expensive, but limited, hammer.
I wonder, is there another country which maintains huge expensive military structures which has recently been casting about for metaphorical nails?
Blonderengel
@frosty:
“An Einstein quote seems germane here…”
The god damn Germans got nothin’ to do with it!
;)
Tim F.
@Redhand: Missed the point by ten miles.
Quiddity
What kind of dog is that puppy?
Redhand
@Tim F.:
As I said before, Tim, abstruse doesn’t even begin to describe your “point.” Humor me, please, what was the point?