States was understood to be, at best, futile. Japan could not defeat the United States, and
US possessions in the Western Pacific were anyway of no inherent material interest. In
Japanese perspective the value of the Philippines was political and geostrategic: they
were important to Japan because of their location and American ownership.
The central plot to this strategic historical narrative was, on the one hand, Japan’s
determination to construct a great East Asian empire, bulked up by a totally subordinated
China, and, on the other hand, America’s mounting determination to prevent this from
happening. The diplomatic story of 1940–1 is one of repeated, ever-escalating American
efforts to deter Japanese forward moves, and of the Japanese search for some political
formula for its relations with China which Washington would find tolerable. But it
could not be done. Both parties were sincere. Neither wanted to go to war with the other.
American pressure was applied in two policy steps, both keyed to Japanese behaviour
towards French Indo-China. Following the French surrender on 22 June 1940, and given
Britain’s understandable preoccupation with home defence, Japan sought to exploit the
situation by closing the two overland routes by which Western aid was reaching China:
the road from northern Indo-China and the specially constructed ‘Burma Road’. The
French and the British acquiesced and Japanese military intervention became large scale
with an actual invasion of the north of Indo-China on 23 September 1940. The United
States, however, was not ready to appease Japan just because Germany was triumphant
in Europe. In July 1940, Washington imposed a selective embargo on aviation gasoline,
on some lubricants and on scrap iron and steel. This was more of a warning than a severe
punishment, but it was an unmistakable shot across the bows for Japan.
The strategic history of 1941, of the drift to war in the Pacific, can appear almost to
have been scripted. Nothing in history is truly inevitable: possible contingency always
may lurk in the unknown future to ambush those who believe that they can foresee how
events will unfold. Nevertheless, by 1941 it is difficult to see how the Pacific War could
have been prevented. At issue was the future of the Japanese Empire, particularly its
expanding imperium over the coastal third of China. If Tokyo would not change its policy
fundamentally towards China, a policy that it had pursued, in fits and starts, for half a
century, then there could be no political accommodation with the United States. By 1941,
indeed by 1940, Washington was the leader and essential mover of an anti-Japanese
coalition, one that was known informally as the ABCD powers (America, Britain, China,
Dutch East Indies).
By 1941 the United States was determined to reverse Japan’s continuing efforts to
subjugate China, not merely to prevent further Japanese aggression. Japanese offers
to settle for what they had seized already did not meet with a friendly response in
Washington. Given that the United States was by no means ready for war in the Pacific,
or anywhere else, in 1941, and was committed to the defeat of Germany as the first
priority should the country become a formal belligerent, its strategic options were
distinctly limited. However, those options were to prove potent, and provocatively so. The
drift to war in 1941 was the result of reciprocal strategic misjudgements by Tokyo and
Washington.
In an effort to reduce the number of its potential enemies, at least for a while, Japan
signed a five-year neutrality pact with the Soviet Union on 13 April 1941. The German
invasion on 22 June caused a brief period of euphoria in Tokyo. The apparent defeat of
the Red Army in the first month enabled Japanese leaders to persuade themselves that
World War II in Asia–Pacific, I 165