ABSTRACT
“At the summit of foreign policy,” Warner Schilling once observed, “one always finds simplicity and spook.” This observation was triggered by a consideration of the process by which Japan and the United States managed to go to war with each other in 1941. Japan, he notes, launched war on the vague, unexamined hope that the United States would seek a compromise peace after being attacked, “a hope nourished in their despair at the alternatives.” Meanwhile, “the American opposition to Japan rested on the dubious proposition that the loss of Southeast Asia could prove disastrous for Britain’s war effort and for the commitment to maintain the territorial integrity of China—a commitment as mysterious in its logic as anything the Japanese ever conceived.” And at no time, he notes, did American leaders “perplex themselves with the question of just how much American blood and treasure the defense of China and Southeast Asia was worth” (Schilling, 1965:389; see also Russett, 1972; Mueller, 1995:101–110).
