At the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the entire
Korean
Peninsula came under the control of the
Japanese Empire and was swiftly and forcefully assimilated as a province of
Japan itself. All aspects of Korean life from language to religion were brought
into commonality with those of Japan.
Manchuria lay Immediately to the north, separating Japanese
Korea from Russia. In 1931, Japan
invaded and quickly occupied Manchuria in order to establish a buffer state
from its former enemy.
Six
years later, in July 1937, and to secure access to needed raw materials, agricultural
products, and effectively, slave labor, the expansive minded Japanese Empire,
invaded China itself.
America and its European consorts, long supporters of the
corrupt Chiang Kai-shek governance in China, protested but to no avail.
Reacting to the invasion of China, the US
State Department in 1938, directed banks in the US, both domestic and
international, not to extend credit to Japanese businesses.
In 1939, with
still no end to the conflict, the United States nullified its 1911 commercial treaty between the
United States and Japan, leading to an American embargo of airplanes, spare
parts, machine tools, and aviation gasoline.
One year
later, this embargo was expanded to include oil, iron and steel scrap, and similar
commodities that Japan needed for its on-going war with China.
This hit Japan's economy particularly hard because 74% of
Japan's scrap iron in 1938 as well as
93% of Japan's copper came from the United States.
Not wanting to be left out and having mutual interests in
the Far East, Great Britain and the Netherlands soon signed-on to the economic
embargo.
To further strangle Japan’s ability to trade, the Panama Canal
was blocked to Japanese shipping, effectively depriving them of markets in
Europe, South America and the Caribbean.
In early 1941, Japan,
faced with inevitable industrial collapse, occupied southern Indochina, with
the consent of the pro- German Vichy government in France. Not only did this
give Japan rubber and agricultural products and the ports to ship them, it also
threatened British Malaya, Borneo and Brunei, as
well as the Dutch East Indies, all of which contained critical manufacturing elements
that Japan needed.
Reacting to the Indo-China invasion, the U.S. froze Japanese
assets on July 26, 1941, and within a week further established a total embargo
on oil and gasoline exports to Japan. Once again, America was joined by the
British and the Dutch.
The oil embargo was an especially strong response because oil
was Japan's most crucial import, and more than 80% of Japan's oil at the time
came from the United States.
Faced with the foreseeable collapse of its economy and its
very life as a nation, Japan girded for war, war with the European and American
powers who stood in their way, and denied what it believed was its unmistakable
destiny, control of Asia and the Western Pacific, inaugurating a regime of
Japanese dominance.
In December 1941, little more than three months later, Japan
attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Britain at
Singapore and Malaysia, and the Dutch in the East Indies (Indonesia) and Borneo.
The apocryphal dogs of war had been released.
The point at issue now is: Dare we substitute Iran for Japan
in the above treatise?
"Those who
cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
George Santayana
(1905)
Reason in Common Sense, p. 284, volume 1 of The Life of Reason