(Page 5 of 53) - Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration authored by Mueller, John.

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

An alternative policy: containment. The war killed millions people in Asia, and it finally forced

the Japanese out of their imperial possessions. But the United States could have pursued a continued
policy of cold war rather than hot--that is, of harassment and containment, economic pressure, arming to
deter and to threaten, assistance to anti-Japanese combatants, and perhaps limited warfare on the
peripheries. The goal of a continued containment policy would have been limited. It would have sought
only to compel Japan to retreat from its empire, not, like the war, to force the country to submit to
occupation. Such a policy might well eventually have impelled Japan to withdraw from its empire at far
lower cost to the United States, to Japan, and to the imperialized peoples.

Although the strategy of containment is associated with postwar U.S. policy toward the Soviet

Union, it was also basically the initial policy of the British and French in response to the German invasion
of Poland in 1939. The allies did not launch direct war, but instead harassed the Germans in places like
Norway, put on economic pressure, built up their forces behind defensive barriers, looked for opportunities
to aid resistance movements and to exploit fissures in the German empire, and sat back patiently. It was
cold war, though it was called "phoney war."

The crucial defect in the containment policy directed at

Germany was that Germany was (obviously) capable of invading and defeating France. By contrast, Japan
could not invade and defeat the United States. Furthermore, Germany did not at the time present a ripe
opportunity for punishing harassment because it was not entangled in a continental war the way Japan was
in China, nor could it as readily be economically strained. Thus a policy that failed against Germany had a
far greater chance of success against Japan, had it been tried.

That containment can be effective under the right conditions has of course now been

demonstrated. After the war the United States and its allies were confronted with another expanding and
threatening empire, this one based in Moscow and directed by Josef Stalin, one of history's greatest
monsters. A major war against that empire at the time--perhaps with the Germans and Japanese now as
allies and with American industry again cranked up for maximum military effort--might very well have
been successful, and the costs might have been no higher than those incurred in defeating the Japanese
empire. With victory in this war, the gains of 1989-91, including the toppling of Soviet Communism, might
have been achieved 40 years earlier. However, although the Soviets may have been expansionary and
even more murderous than the Japanese, and although they may ultimately have presented a more visceral
and wideranging threat to American values than the comparatively localized Japanese, the Soviets, unlike
the Japanese, were not so foolhardy in the course of expansion as to attack American property directly.

Accordingly, as discussed in section 3, the United States adopted and maintained a patient policy of
containment, economic pressure, arms buildup, peripheral war, and harassment against its new enemy. It
took a long time--some 45 years--for the Soviet empire to disintegrate (and as argued in the section 3, the
containment policy might not have been necessary to bring this about).

But it is difficult to find people

who think that fighting a war like World War II (even one without nuclear weapons) to speed that process
up would have been worthwhile.

A similar firm, patient policy of cold war rather that hot might well have worked with the Japanese

For a discussion, see Quester 1977, 135-138.

Curiously, when American troops were being sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 to deter a possible Iraqi attack on that

country, American leaders were greatly concerned that their as yet outnumbered forces might be attacked at any
moment (Woodward 1991, 274, 304). No one, it appears, considered that a would-be aggressor might find the example
of the American reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack to be sobering. On this issue, see Mueller 1994, 123.

Unlike the Soviets, the Japanese may not have been planning a permanent empire. They said they were willing to

promise in 1941 that after peace was established in China, they would remove their troops in 25 years (Ike 1967, 210).