Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The steps leading to open war between Japan and the Western Powers were delayed by the long-drawn indecision of the Sino-Japanese War. For years Japan hoped to find a solution for its economic and social problems in a decisive victory over China, while in the same years the Western Powers hoped for an end to Japanese aggression by a Japanese defeat in China. Instead, the struggle in that area dragged on without a decision. The Western Powers were too divided at home and among themselves, too filled with pacifism and mistaken political and economic ideas to do anything decisive about China, especially when open war was impossible and anything less than war would injure China as well as Japan. Thus, no sanctions were imposed on Japan for its aggression on Manchuria in 1931 or for its attack on North China in 1937. The American Neutrality Act was not applied to this conflict because President Roosevelt adopted the simple legalistic expedient of failing to “find” a war in the Far East. But the mere existence of laws which might have imposed economic sanctions or economic retaliation on Japan revealed to that country the basic weakness of its own position.

In 1937 Japan received a series of lessons in the precarious state of its strategic-economic position. In the first half of that year, as background for its growing military pressure on China, Japan bought a record amount of American scrap iron and steel, 1.3 million metric tons in six months. Agitation to curtail this supply, either by applying the Neutrality Act to the Sino-Japanese conflict or by some lesser action, was growing in the United States. Early in October 1937, President Roosevelt caused a controversy by a speech suggesting a “quarantine” of aggressor nations. Isolationist sentiment in the United States, especially in the Midwest, was too strong to allow the administration to take any important steps toward such a “quarantine.” Nevertheless, Stimson, who had been American secretary of state at the time of the Manchurian crisis in 1931, made a public appeal for an embargo on the shipment of war materials to Japan. A month later, November 3-24, 1937, a conference of the signers of the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, which guaranteed the integrity of China, met at Brussels to discuss what steps might be taken to end Japan’s aggression in China. There was considerable talk of economic sanctions, but no Great Power was willing to light the fuse on that stick of dynamite, so the occasion lapsed, and nothing was done. But the lesson was not wasted on Japan; it intensified its efforts to build up Japanese power to a position where it could use political action to defend itself against any economic reprisals. Naturally, the political actions it took in this direction served only to hasten economic reprisals against itself, especially by the United States, the world’s most devoted defender of the status quo in the Far East and the only Great Power in any position, especially after Hitler’s attacks, to adopt an active policy against Japan.

Japan could have achieved little toward a political solution of its problems if it had not been for the aggressions of Italy and Germany on the other side of the world. A full year before the Brussels Conference, on November 25, 1936, Japan had joined the league of aggressors known as the Anti-Comintern Pact. Discussions seeking to strengthen this arrangement into a full German-Japanese alliance went on for years, but were not concluded until September 1940.

Hitler was not sure whether he wanted Japanese support against the Western democracies or against the Soviet Union, and, accordingly, sought an agreement which could be swung either way, while Japan was interested in a German alliance only if it ran against the Soviet Union. At the same time, Germany objected to the Japanese war on China, since this prevented Japan’s strength from being directed against either of Germany’s possible foes, and jeopardized German economic interests in China. All these difficulties continued, although Ribbentrop’s advent to the post of foreign minister in Berlin in February 1938 inaugurated a period of wholehearted cooperation with Japan in China, replacing Neurath’s earlier efforts to maintain some kind of neutral balance in the Sino-Japanese War. The German military advisers with Chiang Kai-shek were withdrawn, although some of them had been in their positions for ten years and were likely to be replaced by Soviet advisers; the German ambassador was withdrawn from China, and the protection of German interests was generally left to lesser officials, using Japanese officials in areas under Japanese occupation; the Japanese regime in Manchukuo was explicitly recognized (20 February 1938); all shipments of German war materials to China (which reached a value of almost 83 million marks in 1937) were ended, and incompleted contracts totaling 282 million marks were canceled; the Japanese claim that their attack on Nationalist China was really an anti-Communist action, although recognized as a fraud in Berlin, was tacitly accepted; and the earlier German efforts to mediate peace between China and Japan ceased.

In spite of these concessions, Japan continued its efforts to curtail German economic enterprises in China, along with those of other Western nations. The alienation of these two aggressor countries by the summer of 1939 can be judged by the fact that the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 was made in flagrant violation of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Agreement of November 1936, since this latter document bound the signers to make no political agreements with the Soviet Union without the previous consent of the other signatory state. This was regarded in Tokyo as such a blow to the prestige of the Japanese government that the prime minister resigned.

In the meantime the American government began to tighten the economic pincers on Japan just as Japan was seeking to tighten its military pincers on China. In the course of 1939 Japan was able to close all the routes from the outside into China except through Hong Kong, across French Indochina, and along the rocky and undeveloped route from Burma to Chungking. The American government retaliated with economic warfare. In June 1938 it established a “moral embargo” on the shipment of aircraft or their parts and bombs to Japan by simply requesting American citizens to refuse to sell these articles. Early in 1939 large American and British loans to China sought to strengthen that country’s collapsing financial system. In September 1939 Washington gave the necessary six-month notice to cancel the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan; this opened the door to all kinds of economic pressure against Japan. At the same time, the “moral embargo” was extended to eleven named raw materials which were vital to Japan’s war machine. In December this embargo was extended to cover light metals and all machinery or plans for making aviation gasoline.

In general, there was considerable pressure in the United States, both inside the administration and elsewhere, to increase American economic sanctions against Japan. Such a policy was opposed by the isolationists in the country, by our diplomatic agents in Tokyo, and by our quasi-allies, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. These diverse opinions agreed that economic sanctions could be enforced, in the long run, only by war. To put it bluntly, if Japan could not get petroleum, bauxite, rubber, and tin by trade, it could be prevented from seizing areas producing these products only by force. To avoid this obvious inference, Cordell Hull sought to make America’s economic policy ambiguous so that Japan might be deterred from evil actions by fear of sanctions not yet imposed and won to conciliatory actions by hopes of concessions not yet granted. Such a policy was a mistake, but it obtained President Roosevelt’s explicit approval in December 1939. It was a mistake, since it paralyzed the less aggressive elements in Japanese affairs, allowing the more aggressive elements to take control, because the uncertainty it engendered became so unbearable to many, even of the less aggressive, that any drastic action seeking to end the strain became welcome; there was no real faith in America’s intentions, with the result that the period of sustained uncertainty came to be interpreted in Japan as a period of American rearma-ment preliminary to an attack on Japan, and the ambiguity of American commercial policy toward Japan was, over the months of 1940-1941, slowly resolved in the direction of increasing economic sanctions. There was a steady increase in America’s economic pressure on Japan by extensions of the “moral embargo,” by the growth of financial obstacles, and by increasing purchasing difficulties, presumably based on America’s rearmament program.