Disasters in US Diplomacy and Negotiations

December 7th, 1941, “a day that will live in infamy”, These words have been used for decades, over 60 years of our nation saying these words every year to remind us of the way in which our nation was brought into World War II. The media at the time gave the people of the United States the impression that the Japanese were an evil people and all they wanted was to bring the whole of the whole of the world under their control and our nation was next. The reality of this isn’t correct; the Japanese were never on a quest to control the entire world, only to “liberate” the East Asian countries from the influence of the western nations, to make their corner of the world more pure. The Japanese were very involved in a long and bloody war on the Asian mainland over control of China, and did not want to engage themselves into a two front war with the United States. I would argue that the reasons for engaging their nation into a two front war were far more complex than many people realize and if given the choice they would rather fight one enemy at a time before moving on to their next opponent.

The war with China was one that was lasting a lot longer than the Japanese originally thought or intended for it to last. And according to Jonathon Utley the war with China never was intended to be a war. It started as a minor incident between two minor groups of troops near the Marco Polo Bridge just outside of the Capital city of China Beijing. American intelligence thought of it as only a minor incident that would probably be resolved on the spot with no further aggression. But the two countries were more intent on winning and beating the other that it quickly escalated into a full blown war. On one side you had Japan which was much more aggress...

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.... This disaster of diplomacy and negotiations cost both countries hundreds of thousands of lives and showed the world yet again that war was an ugly business. Maybe sometime in the future, people will be more willing to sit down and talk things through seriously before resulting to an armed conflict.

Works Cited

Roosevelt, Franklin, (April 8th, 1939). Roosevelt press conference. no. 537, 13:260ff, PPC, FDRL

Shigenori, Togo. (1956). The Cause of Japan, (Togo Fumihiko & Ben Bruce Blakeney, Trans.). New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.

Utley, Jonathon G. (1976). Upstairs, Downstairs at Foggy Bottom: Oil Exports and Japan, 1940 – 1941. 17 – 28.

Utley, Jonathon G. (1985). Going to War with Japan, 1937 – 1941. Knoxville, Tennessee, University of Tennessee Press.

Welles Sumner, (February – March 1951). Roosevelt and the Far East, Harpers 202 27-38, -70-80.