Containing China - The Historical Analogy with Japan

The following commentary comes from William D. O'Neil via H-War:

The irony of the hand-wringing over "containment" of China is that we've been here before, only no one seems to be able to remember.

As early as the 1890s, widespread alarm was evident in the United States over the specter of Japanese expansionism. This was a mixture of raw ethnocentrism and cold strategic calculation. At the same time, being the kind of country it was (and largely remains) there was no great unity in American views, and many unhesitatingly supported Japan's economic and political ambitions.

Both the Roosevelt (TR) and Wilson Administrations pursued policies of appeasement, while simultaneously building up the navy. The real departure point was the Twenty-One Demands affair of 1915. In the early 1920s the political elites in both countries attempted to build a basis for cooperative relationships, but the rise of very strongly ethnocentric groups in both nations undercut these efforts. Nevertheless, Japan and the United States managed to maintain reasonably productive relationships at many levels during the 1920s, notwithstanding some rather nasty clashes in China, and the ill-will generated by the laws excluding Japanese from American life.

Unfortunately for Japan, the military services fell under the leadership of extremely ethnocentric officers, and the Great Depression undermined those who wanted to advance Japan by economic means. The military came to power, teamed with neoconservative civilians. Japan was in a cycle in which the ethnocentrists would precipitate some expansionist action they saw as essential to national security, the west would respond negatively (even if only symbolically so), and this would evoke fears of "encirclement" (i.e., containment) leading to further expansionism to break out of the "iron ring." Thus even though the anti-Japanese ethnocentrist elements in the west did not hold particularly strong political positions in the 1930s, a self-amplifying positive feedback loop was established and maintained.

Eventually it was the external forcing function of Nazi aggressive expansionism at the other end of Eurasia that tipped Japan into war with the west. It is very possible that matters would never have reached such a pass absent the predominately exogenous shocks of the Great Depression and European War. At the same time, these shocks need not have been fatal had the ethnocentric elements not gained such dominance over Japan.

Despite many changes, the overall sociopolitical constitution of the United States remains much as it has nearly always been. There are both ethnocentric and cosmopolitan elements and neither is likely to be able to establish long-term dominance in the control of the nation's affairs. The United States will thus continue to act somewhat erratically within bounds determined by a broad consensus on basic economic and strategic interests -- which do not in themselves dictate any fundamental conflict with China.

The Chinese system, with its narrow leadership base and lack of regular mechanisms for turnover of power, gives an illusion of a steady hand on policy. But it is even more vulnerable to ethnocentric capture than its Japanese counterpart of the 1920s. Even if this takes place, even if it occurring right now, it need not have effects as terrible as those of World War II, but it would run a very uncomfortably great danger of doing so. The seeming prospect that China is contemplating its own replay of the Tsinan (Jinan) Incident over the Senkakus is anything but reassuring.

Some have objected that no military conflict could eventuate because of the threat of nuclear weapons, but these are not the words of anyone who knows or reflects on history. Ever since humankind has been fighting wars, for at least 100,000 years and very probably longer, unlimited conflicts have always threatened and frequently enough resulted in the destruction of both of the combatant societies. History says very clearly that such a threat may dampen the risks of war but cannot eliminate them. Indeed, the very fact that it is apologists for China (which by any rational calculation would inevitably suffer far more severely in any nuclear exchange) who invariably raise the nuclear specter speaks eloquently of the limited (albeit very great) power of the threat of annihilation.

Afghanistan: 1946

If you'd like to take a trip down memory lane, check out this pamphlet put out by the State Department in 1946. Much has changed, of course, but much has not, like the comment from the first page that "transportation to and from this landlocked country has always been slow and difficult."

Remembering the July 20 Plot - Again

Two years ago I wrote a post about the July 20 plot. This year, commemorating those who attempted to overthrow Hitler in 1944 is even more important to me.

This past semester, as part of my duties as a teaching assistant at Texas A&M, I led discussions on John Weiss' The Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Weiss' argument is easily caricatured: conservatives, traditionalists, big business and Christianity (in particular Catholicism) were responsible for the Holocaust. Only progressive, atheistic (or at least irreligious and relativistic) socialists are free of blame in Weiss' account.

The problems with The Ideology of Death are legion, too many to mention here. I shall concern myself with only one: Weiss all but ignores Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (pictured left) and the July 20 conspirators. Why? Because Stauffenberg represents everything Weiss abhors: a Catholic, an aristocrat, a nationalist and a military officer.

Weiss dismisses the July 20 plotters as johnny-come-latelys. The socialists, he says, had been opposing Hitler from day one, whereas the army only turned against Hitler when it was apparent that defeat was in store. Besides the fact that authors such as Allen Dulles have shown that the army had grave misgivings about Hitler and his band of unprofessional thugs even before the war began, Weiss overlooks a key point: the socialists never came close to toppling Hitler. The July 20 conspirators did.

As if to add insult to injury, Weiss claims that Stauffenberg has been shunned by a nation of proto-fascist Nazi sympathizers in the modern Federal Republic of Germany. His case is weak, at best. Stauffenberg's son Berthold became a general in the post-war German army; another son, Franz-Ludwig, became an elected member of both the German and European parliaments. The members of Germany's elite Wachbataillon take their oath of service on July 20, at the Bendlerblock, where the July 20 conspirators met and were later executed. The street on which it sits has been renamed Stauffenbergstraße and the building now houses the Memorial to the German Resistance.

The modern German army, created in 1955, is keen to sever any connections with its Nazi predecessors. Thus, in addition to post-1955 innovations, there are only two legitimate sources of tradition in the Germany army. One source is the military reformers of the 19th century, men like Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Clausewitz. The other source are the lives and heroic deaths of the July 20 conspirators.

Stauffenberg and his coconspirators were not the only people within Germany to oppose Hitler; brave men and women such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the White Rose movement did likewise. We would do well to reflect on their sacrifices and defend their legacy against the likes of John Weiss.



This post first appeared on The Guild Review, a blog of art, culture, faith and politics.

An Ancient Approach to Political Warfare - Part I

In his work Propaganda and Subversion in the Old Testament, Rex Mason makes regular reference to ‘prophecies after the event,’ (vaticinia ex eventu). Mason’s reading of these accounts is rather straightforward: such prophecies were written after the events they predicted and function as legitimizing propaganda, either for a status quo power or for forces of change.* While this may be the case with some prophecies, particularly those whose level of detail cannot otherwise be explained (at least by human factors), there are a variety of other prophetic occasions which allow for a far more nuanced understanding of political warfare as waged in the Old Testament. The appropriation of a pre-existing tradition, rather than the creation of one out of whole cloth, not only provides valuable insights for modern-day political warfare practitioners, but also begins to resolve some of the tension between the human and divine elements of the Old Testament narrative.

In Genesis 15, Abraham is promised the “land from the river of Egypt as far as the great river Euphrates,” including the land of the “Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites and Canaanites.” Mason points out that “these are the very borders ascribed to Solomon’s rule at the height of his fortunes: ‘Solomon exercised rule over all the kingdoms from the River [i.e. the Euphrates], to the land of the Philistines, that is, as far as the border of Egypt’” (33-4; internal quotation from 1 Kings 4:21). Mason comments that “the parallel between the ideal boundary claimed in royal propaganda for Solomon and the extent of land promised to Abraham in the ‘prophecy’ cannot be coincidental,” and concludes that “the stories of Abraham have an element of royal ideology in them” (34). However, an alternative reading of this parallelism is plausible.

It is quite possible that the story of the land promised to Abraham predated the Davidic monarchy; even if some editing has occurred between the Davidic-era version and the one that has come down to us, the essential details – including the borders of the lands promised to Abraham – may have already been set down. In such a case, Solomon would not have created the account of earlier events to match his kingdom, but shaped the perception of his kingdom to imply continuity with the past. Without realizing, Mason himself seems to have considered this possibility when he notes that the boundaries claimed by Solomon were “very largely fancy, for Solomon’s ‘empire’ (if such it may be called) certainly did not extend as far nor did he receive tribute from as many nations,” as named in the Abrahamic prophecy (34).**

A host of similar cases can be found in Mason’s work. He contends, for example, that the accounts of the Israelite tabernacle are “clearly influenced by the later Jerusalem temple,” in an attempt by priestly editors to write the central role of the temple into earlier history (57). While this interpretation is possible, Mason’s chronological gymnastics are hardly necessary to understand the parallelism between the tabernacle and the temple. Just as likely, priestly or royal personnel involved in the construction of the temple reached into Israelite history and consciously drew upon the example of the tabernacle, in order to imply continuity with the past, even if the temple in fact marked a shift in Israelite spirituality, as Mason argues.

Coming soon: Part II.


* I employ the term ‘propaganda’ throughout in the same way Mason does, to indicate ‘the presentation of material so as to express a particular belief or set of beliefs in such a way as to command assent to it from those to whom it is addressed’ (170). Thus, ‘propaganda’ is a neutral term referring to a method, not to the truth or falsehood, justice or injustice of the cause being promoted.

** To be fair, Mason does not explicitly advocate the position that these prophecies were completely fabricated after the fact; rather, he leaves the issue of their original material largely untouched, and appears not to have thought about this question in a systematic way. Thus, we find him at one point claiming that “the priests were creating a social order” (63) and then turning around and writing that the priests “skillfully preserved continuity with what had gone before” (64, emphasis added).

This post first appeared on The Guild Review earlier this month.