Preface
Since the 1991 Desert Storm operation against Iraq, few Americans have questioned the premise that countries, including their own, sometimes fight wars for control of "strategic" natural resources. Whatever the claims of White House spokesmen about preserving liberty in Kuwait, Washington and its allies intervened to prevent Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from dominating the world's richest oil-producing region, the Persian Gulf.
More than a decade earlier, a series of oil embargoes, the famous prediction in The Limits to Growth of imminent resource depletion, and warnings by conservatives over Soviet plots to grab the resources of southern Africa gave rise to numerous treatises on the strategic importance of vital raw materials. "Whoever controls world resources controls the world in a way that mere occupation of territory cannot match," one popular book declared in 1980. ". . . If there is another world war, the conflict will most likely be over what the industrial states have come to regard as the elements of survival. Oil, of course, but also iron, copper, uranium, cobalt, wheat, and water."[1]
A vast body of literature now exists to explain international conflict in terms of competition over material resources, including oil and strategic minerals.[2] Yet most historians have shied away from considering material influences on recent U.S. foreign policy, perhaps because of the apparent Marxist cast to that approach.[3]
This book aims to show that half a century before Desert Storm, the United States fought another, much costlier war for
strategic resources. The United States' war with Japan from 1941 to 1945 was primarily a battle for control of Southeast Asia's immense mineral and vegetable wealth. The region, comprising Burma, British Malaya, French Indochina, the Netherlands East Indies, the Philippines, and Thailand, held rich supplies of rubber, tin, tungsten, and other tropical commodities essential to the economies of the advanced industrial nations. Japan sought to end Western dominance of Asia and build a self-sufficient economy by integrating these lands into its own bloc, isolating the United States and Great Britain from their primary sources of these products. Defending a status quo that favored the Western liberal powers, the United States drew the line for Japanese expansion at Southeast Asia.
U.S. economic stakes in the region had been growing for years. By 1939, the United States was importing more goods from the Far East than from any other part of the world. The region's share of total U.S. imports soared to 30 percent from only 13 percent in 1910.[4] By far the most important source of those imports was Southeast Asia. Three colonies alone—British Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philip-pines—shipped more than half a billion dollars' worth of goods to the United States in 1940, accounting for roughly a fifth of all U.S. purchases abroad.[5]
Southeast Asia was an inexhaustible source of mineral and vegetable products for U.S. industry. The United States bought most of its rubber and tin from British Malaya.[6] As for the Netherlands East Indies, one contemporary observer declared that it "constitutes the richest colonial plum in the world. It produces rubber, tin, petroleum, sugar, coffee, tin, tobacco, copra, palm oil, and a host of other products, agricultural and mineral."[7] By 1939, the Dutch colony supplied more than half of the United States' needs for no fewer than fifteen distinct commodities, including nutmeg, pepper, and palm oil, besides exporting large quantities of rubber, tin, oil, and bauxite.[8]
But simple trade figures do not begin to tell the whole story of U.S. economic dependence upon Southeast Asia. With the world engulfed in war, vital industrial materials took on a
strategic importance far outweighing their dollar value. Cut off from their Southeast Asian supply lines, whole industries would be unable to begin even the first stage of production and would face agonizing readjustments or total ruin. Production lines of tanks, trucks, and ships might grind to a halt. These were the real stakes, as popular economic analyst Eliot Janeway asserted at the time: "It is on the economic front that Japan's drive threatens us most dangerously: the American economy, and with it American defense, cannot be operated without rubber and tin, which at present cannot be obtained in adequate quantity except from the British and Dutch colonies in southeastern Asia. And Japan today commands the trade route connecting the west coast of the United States with the Malaysian Straits. . . . Here, ready to hand for Japan, is a safer and more powerful weapon against the United States than the folly of naval attack."[9]
And as the State Department's chief Far East expert, Stanley Hornbeck, concurred in 1940, "the United States finds itself so vitally and overwhelmingly dependent on southeastern Asia that our entire foreign policy must be adjusted to that fact. . . . It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States would be compelled, for its existence as a major industrial state, to wage war against any power or powers that might threaten to sever our trade lines with this part of the world."[10]
This explanation of the origins of U.S. involvement in the Pacific War is "radical" in its departure from the conventional historical wisdom, but it is not dogmatically unicausal. Although stressing material factors, my account of U.S. motives and interests embraces the importance of subjective factors. Perceptions of material reality are always filtered through ideological lenses. Thus, Washington's fear of losing raw materials was based on assumptions about the unwillingness of autarkic powers to sell goods freely and about the limits of the U.S. economy's ability to absorb supply shocks. Washington's sense of dependence was also conditioned by its perception that the nation's security depended on maintaining an industrial base to support a world-class navy capable of projecting power on
all oceans. Its sense of threat was magnified by a history of antagonism with Japan and a belief that new aggressor nations were bent on forcefully revising the international division of resources at the expense of established powers.
Unlike some theorists, moreover, I make no claims for the universal application of a materialist model to international relations. Any single explanation is likely over the long term to run up against the reality of shifting interests, ideals, and passions that sway publics and decisionmakers. But whatever the motives behind U.S. foreign policy at other times and places, the evidence shows that in 1940 and 1941 a series of contingent circumstances elevated Southeast Asia to a position of fundamental importance to Washington. These circumstances included the United States' preoccupation with recovering from the Great Depression, its sense of economic, political, and physical insecurity in a world of rising totalitarian powers, the reliance of its mass-production economy on huge imports of raw materials, and the extraordinary geographic concentration of many of those materials in Southeast Asia.
Washington's response to these circumstances was fundamentally shaped by a worldwide resurgence of mercantilism in the 1930s. With the onset of the Depression, states increasingly treated international trade less as a mutually enriching activity than as a win-or-lose competition for limited spoils. Mercantilists stressed that from international economic advantage derives national power and the ability, in turn, to dictate the rules of the international system. Neomercantilist logic dictated that states could only preserve their independence by minimizing their dependence on unstable or hostile sources of supply, including trading blocs and cartels.[11]
Even Americans who remained faithful to liberal economic principles granted the importance of avoiding dependence on unfriendly foreign powers, but a vigorous debate emerged over the means. Isolationists maintained that the country could secure its economy solely by stockpiling precious raw materials and developing new sources of supply in the Western Hemisphere. In contrast, interventionists (whom the Roosevelt ad-
ministration heeded) insisted on the need to augment such measures with defense of distant raw material "lifelines." Just as Tokyo took up arms to end Japan's dependence on the United States as a supplier of oil and other raw materials, so Washington was ready to defend its economic and political independence from a Japanese "new order" encompassing Southeast Asia.
Historians who see "ideals" motivating the United States and "interests" driving other nations have freely accepted Japan's economic interests in the region as an explanation for its policy of southward expansion. But many otherwise fine and perceptive accounts of U.S. policy ignore a wealth of evidence that policymakers in Washington were no less determined to maintain control over the region's resources for economic and strategic ends, even at the risk of war.[12]
Interpretations of what motivated President Roosevelt and his advisers include virtually every explanation but this one. Paul Schroeder, summarizing the consensus of scholars in the 1950s, declared: "In judging American policy toward Japan in 1941, it might be well to separate what is still controversial from what is not. There is no longer any real doubt that the war came about over China."[13] Many historians still agree. Wayne Cole, for example, has asserted that "the United States and Japan went to war in 1941 because they were unable or unwilling to compromise their conflicting interests in China."[14] Frederick Marks III blames Washington's confrontation with Tokyo in part on the sentimental attachment Roosevelt and other key policymakers had for China.[15]
Other historians trace the causes of war to the firmly held, if perhaps unrealistic, principles of Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his associates. Norman Graebner sees Washington defending the principles of international law and the "post-Versailles treaty structure" rather than concern for China.[16] David Reynolds argues that "the United States had no vital interests in the Far East" and that its concerns "sprang from confused moralizing rather than a hard-headed assessment of U.S. interests."[17] In a similar vein, Akira Iriye, Waldo Heinrichs, and Michael Barnhart believe the administration was driven by the
general canons of Wilsonian liberalism—the principles of peaceful change, the Open Door, national sovereignty, and territorial integrity.[18]
A variant on the Wilsonian theme, emphasizing its economic content, was elaborated years ago by William Appleman Williams and his followers. They saw a constant hunger for markets, reflected in the Open Door policy enunciated by Secretary of State John Hay in 1898, as the dominating force in U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. Through its invasion of China, Japan violated the Open Door principle by threatening to cut the United States off from markets of immense potential.[19]
A more recent offshoot of this "Open Door" theory of U.S. policy grants the existence of an expansionist economic ideology—but not with respect to China. For Jonathan Utley, "The important factor, the factor that would transform dislike for Japan into action against Japan, was the Japanese assault on the liberal commercial world order." Yet Utley stresses that the United States "had never been prepared to pay a price to preserve China's integrity or the Open Door there." China was merely a "pawn whose inexhaustible manpower would be sacrificed to keep Japan from moving into the important region of Southeast Asia." Utley also rejects the proposition that Southeast Asian raw materials were the issue. He is thus left arguing that the administration defended an abstract principle without any specific application.[20]
Deborah Miner also views Southeast Asia as the central theater of U.S.-Japan confrontation but claims that Washington simply never bothered to analyze the nature of U.S. interests in the region. Instead, she asserts, it accepted at face value dubious British declarations of the region's importance to the European war effort. Like other historians of the period, she ignores the extensive studies produced at the time by military and civilian experts of U.S. and British dependence on "strategic materials" from Southeast Asia.[21]
One final group of diplomatic historians blames public opinion for pushing the Roosevelt administration, whose real con-
cern was Europe, into war. Robert Dallek, a leading chronicler of Roosevelt's foreign policy, believes the president had to get tough on Japan in order to win a national consensus for mobilization against Nazi Germany.[22] Similarly, Israeli scholar Abraham Ben-Zvi describes a relatively weak and indecisive Roosevelt who was "unwilling to alienate the pro-internationalist forces whose support was essential in the struggle to contain Hitler in Europe." FDR thus ceded policy toward Japan to hard-line hawks who believed that Japan, in conjunction with Nazi Germany, threatened to "disrupt the balance of power."[23]
Despite this plethora of theories, most historians have paid surprisingly little attention to how top policymakers defined the "national interest." Instead, with few exceptions, their many excellent accounts chronicle the various diplomatic blunders, bureaucratic maneuvers, and tactical detours along the road to war.[24] In some cases, this obliviousness to larger interests has led historians to view the war as a product of avoidable factors such as "mutual misunderstanding, language difficulties and mistranslations" rather than a profound conflict over national objectives.[25]
My intent is not to belittle the importance of ideals, misunderstandings, cultural barriers, and human frailty in explaining U.S. conduct during this period. Rather, I wish to highlight previously ignored motives that finally prompted the Roosevelt administration in late 1941 to set aside its paramount goal: avoiding a two-front war of unimaginable costs and risks. The specter of such a calamity had long mandated a policy of caution even in the face of flouted principles and serious provocations. Japan had been slamming the Open Door in the United States' face for years. From China to Ethiopia to Czechoslovakia, lawless nations trampled on international law and outraged decent peoples without prompting the United States to take up arms. It took a larger threat to U.S. security and interests to bring the Roosevelt administration to the verge of war with Japan—even before Pearl Harbor.
In making this case, I do not try to supplant more detailed day-by-day accounts of the prewar negotiations. Nor do I make
any original or extended effort to evaluate Japanese policy, for which a number of fine histories also exist. My focus is on decisionmaking in Washington: how policymakers defined the national interest, how they viewed Japan's threat to it, and how they weighed the prospects and perils of various means of meeting that challenge.
To this end, I have relied primarily on a wealth of published documents and unpublished material in the manuscript collections of such officials as President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and various officials of lower rank.[26] Records of the State Department, Navy, War Production Board, Council on Foreign Relations, British Foreign Of-rice, and British War Cabinet also proved useful. Most of these sources are not novel; my reading of them is. In addition, I have reviewed a large but largely forgotten literature from the time, produced by academics, business writers, journalists, and other pundits, to gauge the extent of popular concerns over U.S. dependence on foreign supplies of strategic materials. By exploiting the untapped potential of all these sources, I hope to shed new light on the origins of this terrible war and make future historians argue the question of interests more deeply and thoughtfully.
The usual author's disclaimer—that all mistakes and misjudgments are mine alone—certainly applies to this work. But if those faults have been kept at a minimum, thanks must go to a number of careful readers. Barton Bernstein provided invaluable support, penetrating criticism, and the high example of his own scholarship. Anthony Barnett, Diane Clemens, Robert Keohane, Leonard Liggio, Ronnie Lipschutz, and Laurence Shoup also read the manuscript in earlier forms and offered useful advice. I am grateful to the Center for International Studies at Stanford University for a research grant and to archivists in Cambridge, Hyde Park, London, Stanford, and Washington for generous assistance. My wife Lorrie helped in ways too numerous to list, including distracting our playful daughters from the computer while I completed this manuscript.