A HISTORICAL LOOK AT A SERIES OF EVENTS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD AND MAY WELL DO SO AGAIN

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