Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
And he knew how to negotiate, and he knew the value of maintaining foreign contacts; in short he knew that Americans aren't the only people on Earth. Maybe there would have been no 9/11 if Roosevelt had been Pres.
He was good at negotiation. So good, I think he almost averted war with Japan, although he himself did not realize it at the time.
One of the reasons Japan attacked in 1941 was because they thought Russia would soon lose the war and be taken over by Germany. Japan feared the Soviet Union more than they feared the US, but they thought it would soon be defunct.
There were sane people in Japan who understood that war with the US would be a disaster. Especially Yamamoto, the head of the Navy, They were trying to stop the confrontation. They almost succeeded in delaying the attack on Pearl Harbor. If they had delayed, the attack could not have gone forward until March or April 1942, and by that time the Japanese government would have realized that Russia was not going to lose to Germany, and the European balance of power would not change. They also might have realized that some of their own hard-line diplomats were lying about the US position. In secret memos within the Japanese government, the hard-liners misrepresented the US negotiating position. They claimed the US was trying to push them out of all their Asian colonies, including China, Manchuria, Taiwan and Korea. That was not true. The US negotiators only wanted a settlement in China; they never made any demands about the other colonies. By March 1942, cooler heads might have prevailed, an accurate translation of the US negotiating position might have reached the prime minister, and war might have been averted. That would have been good . . . except that in that scenario the US would never have gone to war in Europe; England alone would never have invaded the continent; and the Nazis would still be running things in Western Europe.
- Jed
