How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer & Sebastian Rosato

Author:John J. Mearsheimer & Sebastian Rosato [Mearsheimer, John J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Economics, International Relations, Diplomacy, Philosophy, Political, History & Theory, General, Political Science, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780300269307
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2023-01-15T14:27:35.190069+00:00

Japan Decides to Attack the United States at Pearl Harbor

The Japanese decision to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor is often described as a product of nonrational thinking and nondeliberation. Lebow and Stein argue that Japanese decision makers engaged in “wishful thinking,” going to war because they “deluded themselves that their foe would accept . . . defeat instead of fighting to regain the initiative.”23 Snyder also concludes that policymakers in Tokyo were nonrational and that the reason they “failed to retreat from the precipice is that years of strategic mythmaking had so skewed Japanese perceptions that a clear-sighted appraisal of alternatives had become impossible.”24 Charles Kupchan claims that “the image equating Japanese security with the establishment of the Co-Prosperity Sphere so imbued the mindset and values of elites that it overrode logic indicating that efforts to realize this notion of security would likely bring ruin to the metropole.” By the time it attacked the United States, Japan “was not simply seeking resources; it was carrying out a spiritual mission.” Japanese decision makers were driven by “their cognitive and emotional commitment to realizing their imperial aspirations.”25 Meanwhile, Jeffrey Record argues that Japan’s choice of war “owed much to Japanese racism, fatalism, imperial arrogance, and cultural ignorance.” Policymakers in Toyko allowed “their imperial ambitions to run hopelessly far ahead of their military capacity . . . displayed a remarkable incapacity for sound strategic thinking [and] were simultaneously mesmerized by short-term operational opportunities and blind to their likely disastrous long-term strategic consequences.”26

Dale Copeland summarizes this conventional wisdom concerning why Japan decided to attack the United States: “For most international relations scholars who have delved into this question, the answer is straightforward: Japanese leaders and officials by 1941 were no longer operating in a rational manner. They were filled with a host of irrational beliefs, including the argument that to sustain their vision of empire, they had no other choice but to fight the United States.”27

As for nondeliberation, Robert Jervis emphasizes the shoddy quality of the Japanese decision-making process, quoting Robert Scalapino to make his point: “Instead of examining carefully the likelihood that the war would in fact be a short, decisive one, fought under optimum conditions for Japan, contingency plans increasingly took on a strangely irrational, desperate quality, in which the central issue, ‘Can we win?,’ was shunted aside.”28 Snyder also concludes that the Japanese policy process was nondeliberative, suggesting that “one way this myopia may have arisen was that elites confused each other about the costs and risks of various alternatives by systematically falsifying or withholding information.”29 Van Evera asserts that the Japanese government “never seriously studied Japan’s chances of winning a war against the United States. It made no overall estimate of Japan’s power and had no master plan for the conduct of the war. It failed to analyze the likely effect of attacking Pearl Harbor on American will to defeat Japan. The Japanese Navy never seriously discussed the implications of its proposed advance into Southeast Asia. . . . The Japanese army made no

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