Review of Sidney Pash's "The Currents of War: A New History of American-Japanese Relations, 1899-1941"
"In recent decades the study of social history has superseded the investigation of more traditional topics such as political and diplomatic history. This trend has also been encouraged by the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the recent crisis in the Ukraine and Crimea re-emphasizes the significance of international diplomacy and how diplomatic failures and misunderstandings may lead to war. Within this contemporary context it is well worth taking a look at diplomatic historian Sidney Pash's new book on the relations between Japan and the United States leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pash, a former Fulbright Fellow in Japan and an associate professor of history at Fayetteville State University, argues that war between Japan and the United States was not the inevitable clash of two expansionist empires in the Pacific. Instead, Pash maintains that diplomatic miscalculations and assumptions, especially on the part of the United States, produced a conflict that might have been settled at the negotiating table.
Observing that following the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 the victorious Japanese emerged as the greatest threat to the American Open Door in China, Pash asserts that beginning with the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt the United States developed strategies to contain Japanese expansion. According to Pash, this containment policy was based upon four pillars: maintenance of the balance of power, military deterrence, diplomatic engagement, and economic coercion. In the final analysis, Pash believes that the decision to abandon diplomatic engagement in favor of economic sanctions culminated in the Pacific War.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the emphasis in American foreign policy was upon diplomatic engagement in which agreements such as Taft-Katsura, Root-Takahira, and Lansing-Ishii sought to limit Japanese expansion while recognizing their interests in China and Korea. However, Pash insists that the Washington Conference of 1922 was an attempt to contain and even roll back Japanese expansion rather than diplomatically engage with Tokyo. The Washington agreement unraveled in the early 1930s under the pressure of war between China and Japan. Encouraged by the Open Door and American missionary activity in China, the United States supported China in this conflict. Pash concludes that the collapse of the Washington Conference order "meant the end of a spirit that, whatever its limitations, was predicated on the belief that diplomatic engagement and cooperative diplomacy could contain Japan more effectively than economic sanctions and military deterrence. After 1933, Washington had no such illusions, and for eight years the Roosevelt administration consistently shunned Tokyo's efforts at a Japanese-American reapproachment and actively opposed efforts by the British and the Chinese to improve their relations with Japan…"
Full review here
hnn.us/article/155437
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