Realitybites said:
ShooterTX said:
Realitybites said:
Japan was an Allied Power in World War I.
23 years later they bombed Pearl Harbor.
Such a drastic change requires some self examination. It is also a lesson on how quickly the world can change.
Are you implying that the United States was somehow responsible for causing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor? That the US did something that made them want to attack?
I'm saying that if in 23 years you can go from fighting a war with someone to fighting a war against someone that the foreign policy that led to such an outcome needs to have a proctologist look at it.
This is equally true of the few decades from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current mess in Ukraine.
Not all wars can be avoided. But it is one thing for simmering tensions between hostile nations to boil over (Armenia/Azerbaijan), and it is quite another to convert an ally or potential ally into an enemy in a short period of time.
I think the bigger difference is actually Japan, not America. Japan before WW1 was relatively peaceful, outside of the conflict with Russia. Japan wanted to maintain it's influence over Manchuria, but Russia refused to allow that... so they went to war. Japan won the war, and the begging of the Russian decline followed.
Japan was not really an ally of America... it was an ally of the UK. When America joined the war, we were allies with everyone who was an ally of the UK. So technically, we were allies with Japan.
Japan in the 1930s was invading, conquering and occupying nations all around Eastern Asia.
They invaded China, Indochina, and many other nations. They also became allies with Nazi Germany, who was occupying many of our allied nations (France, Belgum, etc) and currently bombing the UK.
So the US stopped trade with Japan because of their actions in Asia, and their support of Germany in Europe.
American polices had nothing to do with Japan becoming an ally of Nazi Germany. Likewise, American polices had nothing to do with Japan invading & conquering nations all across Asia & the Pacific.
The reasons for Japan being an ally and becoming an enemy fall completely upon Japan... not the US.