(Page 4 of 53) - Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration authored by Mueller, John.

Mueller: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggerstion August 2, 2005

assistance to anti-Japanese combatants, especially to China where the Japanese had become painfully
bogged down--although Japan's problems there were due far more to Chinese resistance than to U.S. aid,
which was actually quite modest (Utle y 1985, 135-36).

Should Japan abandon its expansionary imperial

policy, the United States stood ready, as the American ambassador put it at the time, to help Japan
peacefully to gain "all of the desiderata for which she allegedly started fighting--strategic, economic,
financial, and social security" (Butow 1961, 341). (After the war the United States had a chance to carry
out this promise and did so in full measure.)

This American concern with Asia has had its critics. Warner Schilling’s observation quoted at the

beginning of this paper was, in fact, triggered by a consideration of the process by which Japan and the
United States managed to go to war with each other in 1941. Japan, he notes, launched war on the vague,
unexamined hope that the United States would seek a compromise peace after being attacked, "a hope
nourished in their despair at the alternatives." Meanwhile, "the American opposition to Japan rested on the
dubious proposition that the loss of Southeast Asia could prove disastrous for Britain's war effort and for
the commitment to maintain the territorial integrity of China--a commitment as mysterious in its logic as
anything the Japanese ever conceived." And at no time, he notes, did American leaders "perplex
themselves with the question of just how much American blood and treasure the defense of China and
Southeast Asia was worth" (1965, 389). Similarly, Melvin Small observes that "the defense of China was
an unquestioned axiom of American policy taken in along with mother's milk and the Monroe
Doctrine....One looks in vain through the official papers of the 1930s for some prominent leader to say,
`Wait a second, just why is China so essential to our security?'" (1980, 238-39). Jonathan Utley has a
different perspective, but he comes to a similar conclusion: "It was not through a careful review of national
policy or the stakes involved in Asia that the United States would place itself in the path of Japanese
expansion, but incrementally, without long-range planning, and as often as not as a stopgap measure
necessitated, or so the planners thought, by the events in Europe" (1985, 58).

But until Pearl Harbor this policy, however spooky, was comparatively inexpensive. After the

attack, however, it no longer became possible even to consider the question, as Schilling phrases it, of "just
how much American blood and treasure the defense of China and Southeast Asia was worth." Americans
were enraged, threatened, humiliated, and challenged by what Roosevelt called the "unprovoked and
dastardly" blow that had come without warning or a declaration of war, at a time when Japanese officials
were in Washington, deceptively seeming to be working for a peaceful settlement. With the attack,
virtually all remaining reservations vanished as everyone united behind a concerted effort to lash back at
the treacherous Japanese, to exact revenge, and to kick butt. As Morison observes, "isolationism and
pacifism now ceased to be valid forces in American politics" (1963, 69). Or, in Toland's words, "With
almost no exceptions 130,000,000 Americans instantly accepted total war" (1961, 37).

Thus, after suffering the loss of some 2,500 people at Pearl Harbor, the Americans, without

thinking about it any further, reacted (or overreacted) by launching themselves furiously and impetuously
into a war in which they lost hundreds of thousands more.

Utley notes that U.S. aid authorizations in July 1941 were 821,000 tons for Britain, 16,000 for China. See also

Russett 1972, 46.

By contrast, at the time of major escalation in the Vietnam War, American decision makers carefully assessed,

reassessed, and debated the policy premises of the American commitment there. See Mueller 1989, 168-76.

As Morison also points out, it was Pearl Harbor, not the subsequent, more costly and more important attack on

the Philippines that moved American opinion (1963, 77-78). Wohlstetter agrees: "For some reason the damage done
to these other American outposts in the Pacific is not considered in the same category of crime" (1962, 340).