was not pre-arranged. Although Japan bore heavy responsibility for the inflammatory
political context of Sino-Japanese relations, the evidence shows that the exchange of fire
occurred strictly by local initiative, and on the Chinese side at that. But once the touch-
paper was lit and political passions were aroused in China and Japan, the strategic fire
could not be doused. The Japanese Army seized the opportunity created by the incident
and commenced what was to be an eight-year war to subdue the Republic of China by
force of arms. It was this change in policy, above all else, that set Tokyo on a collision
course with Washington.
Japan had long embraced an imperial dream which, though limited, was certainly
extensive. It sought to establish a great empire in East Asia, primarily on the continent
at the expense of Chinese independence. For this empire to be defensible and prosperous,
it had to be robustly self-sufficient in raw materials. Alas, the necessary natural resources
lay at some distance from the Japanese Home Islands and were currently owned by other
powers, chiefly European colonialists. In particular, Japan stood in acute need of oil, tin
and rubber, itself possessing adequate stocks only of coal and iron ore. The Japanese
Empire would be hopelessly vulnerable to blockade unless it expanded its territorial
holdings into South East Asia.
Japan’s strategic context in the 1930s was not enviable. Wherever it looked for
support, it came up empty. Tokyo had no allies, and once it left the League of Nations
in 1932 over that body’s expressed unhappiness at Japanese aggression against China in
Manchuria, there seemed to be menaces on all geostrategic fronts. In summary, in the
mid- to late 1930s, Japan’s quest for self-sufficient empire was opposed militarily in
China by the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek; threatened by large Soviet armed forces
deployed in Outer Mongolia and in the Soviet Far Eastern provinces; blocked by
the European empires of Britain and the Netherlands from South and South East Asia;
and menaced by the US Navy, which, though normally based near San Diego on the
American West Coast, as an intended deterrent was moved far forward to Pearl Harbor
on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands in January 1940. The Philippines were an American
colony and military dependency, and were situated with great geostrategic inconvenience
for Japan between the Home Islands and the South Seas Resources Area in South East
Asia. Geostrategically, then, America was in the way. Indeed, unless Japan was blessed
with an unusually permissive window of strategic opportunity, and was cunning as well
as lucky, there was a distinct possibility that it might find itself alone at war with a wholly
unmatchable coalition of enemies. Adding yet more fuel to the strategic flames, by the
late 1930s Japanese–American political and cultural relations already had recorded a
legacy of forty-plus years of mutual antagonism.
Japan and the United States: the drift to war
The American acquisition of the Philippines from Spain, booty from a short, victorious
war in 1898, all but guaranteed a long-term, tension-fraught relationship with Japan.
As the new owner of the Philippines, the United States became by definition an Asian
power. Moreover, as a simple consequence of strategic geography, the United States
had acquired instantly a defence obligation in the far Western Pacific. From the turn
of the century until 1941 there was only one plausible threat to America’s new Asian
empire, Imperial Japan. The latter demonstrated a highly aggressive policy and strategy
162 War, peace and international relations