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America Can’t Surpass China’s Power in Asia, But It Can Still Prevent Chinese Hegemony
(www.foreignaffairs.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Remember when the USA stopped supplying the Japanese with oil during world War 2? The USA has a gigantic military presence in Japan and laws governing their military, you want them to just leave and let Japan "do their thing"?
The US was literally a state sponsor of Japan's invasion of China, over the course of which more Chinese people were murdered than during the Great Leap Forward. The US was the single primary supplier of oil, steel, iron, copper, and essentially everything that Japan needed to wage war in China from 1937 until 1941 (when the bulk of Chinese casualties occurred due Japanese atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre). Without the US, Japan would not have stood a chance.
Henceforth why the USA did an oil embargo on Japan. Then Japan sneaked attacked the USA for doing that (pearl harbor). Sucks what happened to China, but not everything is America's fault.
Ok, maybe I wasn't clear enough for you.
80% of Japan's oil was from the US. Similar numbers held for steel, iron, bauxite, etc. The US wasn't a war profiteerer in a sea of war profiteers, but the sole reason Japan was able to invade mainland China in the first place. If the US had not supplied Japan, the Pacific Theatre would not exist. 20 million Chinese civilians need not have died.
It's absurd the level of apologism some people have for what was plainly genocidal foreign policy. If the war had ended in November of 1941, America would have been remembered as the key foundation of the Axis Powers in the Pacific.
There's a theory that the US, UK, and France were in fact not perturbed by the rise of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The primary geopolitical foe of Germany was the Soviet Union, and of Japan was China. Both these countries were, if not governed by communists, seeing communism rise rapidly. They were also clear targets, given their richness of resources and geographical proximity. That's why the UK and France signed the Munich Agreement and the US supplied Japan to such a degree - the hope being that the fighting would stamp out the communist threat and allow the "civilized" powers to sweep in and subjugate a battered Germany and Japan. In fact, this isn't really a theory: French and British leaders at the time basically admitted as much.