ABSTRACT
The hypothesis that decision makers in foreign policy act "in accordance with their perception of reality and not in response to reality itself has repeatedly appeared in the vastly expanded literature on the role of perception in international relations. A common denominator in these studies is the notion that perception and cognition intervene between the individual decision maker and his objective environment and that, therefore, the decisions he makes about his environment are subjective. During the years immediately following the Pacific War, two divergent interpretations of American-Japanese relations in the pre-Pearl Harbor era emerged. One of these, the "revisionist" line, argued that the Roosevelt administration deliberately pushed the United States into a war with Japan in the Pacific as a way of entering the war in Europe through the back door.
