ABSTRACT
The seven decades since 1945 have witnessed the production of enormous bodies of scholarly and commercial volumes on World War II history, with titles numbering quite literally tens of thousands by the turn of the twenty-first century. The United States (US) built a historically unrivaled military and bureaucratic machine to manage the global war and the postwar geopolitical realignments. The Soviet Union bordered Manchuria and Korea, another prized colonial possession for Japan and an important gateway to the Pacific. Japanese militarists’ unwillingness to accept the terms established by the United States and their reckless plunge into an unwinnable war in December 1941 seem to have defied rationality. The US proposal, based on the recognition that the United States and the Soviet Union would emerge as the most influential powers in postwar East Asia, included the stabilization of the region under two spheres.
