George Friedman
In 1940, the United States placed Japan in a difficult position. Japan was a country with very limited resources. It had to import oil, steel and other goods from other Asian countries and, to some extent, from the United States. To secure access to these resources, it had tried, years earlier, to build an empire. The U.S. used its economic power to block the sale of oil from what we now call Indonesia, to name just one country, and refused to sell steel to Japan. The U.S. feared that a Japanese Empire would threaten U.S. military command of the Pacific, making the homeland vulnerable to Japanese military power.
This culminated in a U.S. blockade of Japanese imports critical to its industrial survival. Japan could either capitulate to the U.S. or go to war. Tokyo chose war, attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941 in an attempt to cripple U.S. power in the Pacific and force the U.S. to negotiate a new understanding with Japan. Given the antiwar sentiment in the U.S., this was not an outlandish thought, but it was an incorrect one. It’s reported that the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who had spent time in the United States, opposed the attack, believing it would not lead to negotiation, but was overridden.
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