World War I was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.” It should have been. Both sides staring at each other from trenches across a stagnate battlefield finally resulted in an armistice that left the U.S. population saying, “Never again!” It’s a tragedy their wishes were forever ignored.
Unintended consequences can lay around for a long time before they bite you in the butt, and journalists, who are supposed to keep track of things for us, read history like a sporting event. Each game lasts four years and the score at the beginning of every administration is zero/zero.
Uncovering the origins of World War II takes us back to 1905. President Theodore Roosevelt was heavily influenced by fellow Harvard alum Baron Kaneko who was secretary to Japan’s prime minister Ito. Ito sent Kaneko back to the U.S. specifically to influence our president who had little knowledge of the Far East and had never seen the Pacific Ocean.
On July 27, 1905, Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, William Taft, secretly told Japan’s Prime Minister that the U.S. supported Japan’s expansion into Korea. In so doing, he ignored an 1882 treaty between Korea and the U.S. which committed us to defend them if their independence was ever threatened. On November 15, Japan notified Korean emperor Gojong that Japan would henceforth control Korea, which they accomplished without a shot being fired.
Twenty-six years later in 1931, they used Korea as a base for a land invasion of Manchuria and, eventually, into China. A year later, another Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, had succeeded to the presidency and he was influenced by a fellow Harvard alum from China. We were Japan’s source for oil and steel, and pressure was brought to bear to stop selling oil to them, without which their Chinese invasion would be stopped cold.
After vacillating for years, FDR’s administration, under pressure from the China lobby, pulled the plug on Japan’s oil supply in 1941, assuring us that they would never attack us because we were so large, and they were so small. At the same time, Roosevelt had relocated the Pacific fleet from California to Pearl Harbor.
Through ignorance and thoughtlessness by two Roosevelts, the U.S. became engaged in a Pacific Theater war ending four years later with the first and only use of the atomic bomb as a weapon.
Half-Way Around the World
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain caved into a petty little anti-Semite named Adolf Hitler at Munich, setting the stage for the beginning of World War II. Absent the Roosevelts and Chamberlain, that is a war which would never have happened.
Back to China
“There must not and cannot be any conflict, estrangement or misunderstanding between the Chinese people and America,” said Mao Zedong, s it appears on the frontispiece of “The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia” by James Bradley.
Despite several overtures by Mao to the U.S., he was rebuffed by FDR who was captivated by the China lobby and Chiang Kai-shek. This was in spite of strong recommendations to the contrary by U.S. military experts stationed in China. As a result, Mao turned to Russia for support.
Had we opted the other way, there would have been no Korea or Viet Nam military involvement.
And Then There Is the Middle East
From Reagan to Bush to Bush, from Lebanon to Iraq to Afghanistan, we’ve spilled blood and treasure to no discernible benefit to anyone. We funded the resistance to the Russians in Afghanistan and we’re the ones who still have troops there 17 years later. This is discussed in more detail in “Levant Lessons Learned (Or Not),” an OpsLens piece I authored in July 2017.
One Hundred Years Without War
We study history to avoid repeating past mistakes, so how can we profit from the past and spend the next hundred years without war? The answer is easy: ceasing electing incompetent people would be a good beginning. FDR’s policies gave us three wars in addition to an economic cataclysm…and we elected him to the presidency four times.
Our foreign policy must be assertive without being belligerent, and that requires a very strong military to back it up. The real challenge is how do we maintain taxpayer support for the expense of a robust Army, Navy and Air Force in the absence of a tangible threat to our democracy?
If we had no military engagement in the last one hundred years, would we have been the first to develop atomic weaponry? If someone else had made the first A-bomb, that would have drastically altered the world’s balance of power. In the absence of all kinds of rocketry, an Army, an Air Force and Navy needed to project power, would anyone care what we think?
A Cop On the Beat?
“What are we, the world’s policeman?” That’s a derisive chant we hear every time there is a flash-point between here and Timbuctoo. But there is no end to mischief makers around the globe and the U.N. is as useful as mammaries on a male when it comes to law and order. The current administration has shown that a few well-placed rockets in Syria got the world to take seriously the red lines that we draw. Between drones, long-range rockets and satellites, we can inflict devastation on recalcitrant punks any place on the globe without putting American lives on the line.
This is not a role that Americans generally cherish but perhaps it is our destiny. A world without war is a pretty enticing thought. But then, we would need to stop electing idiots.
