Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…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 national seizure of communist state power. And as we'll talk about in the next lecture, that was the very opposite of liberating China. 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 got to get Hitler, you got to beat Germany. Wasn't this just our failure of grand strategy to realize, why are we doing this? What's our strategic objective here? Hold on. 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 if Japan attacked someone else that he would come in. He interprets it 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 going to be fighting Nazis over an attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese. So that's a separate issue. 01:18:06 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. And 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 cared about peace so that they can save face and actually argue for ending war? Just the idea that they're going to give up Manchuria as well, obviously that's not going to happen. And when Secretary of State Hull just sees these vacillating telegrams from the Japanese, he assumes it's because they're fickle or something. It's like, no, it's the civilian part of the government trying its best to prevent the military from taking over. You got to give them something to save face.…

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