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US-China relations
OpinionComment
Gal Luft
Gal Luft

Opinion | Beware a new generation of ‘Washington Warriors’ bent on deterring China

  • US history is no stranger to rambunctious bureaucrats and advisers whose cunningness led America to war
  • Today’s Washington hawks have faith in the invincibility of US military power and its ability to deter China

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Illustration: Craig Stephens
Gal Luft
As the US-China strategic rivalry intensifies, it is easy to forget that, 80 years ago, Japan – America’s close Pacific ally today – attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, unleashing a four-year war over China. While this dire episode is largely diametrically opposed to today’s geopolitical realities, there is one important lesson to draw from it for today’s superpower rivalry.
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The China of 1941 was a poor, rural nation. It was, on one hand, fighting the Japanese Imperial Army, which had controlled large chunks of its territory since 1937, while on the other, it was fighting the forces of the Communist Party. At a time when many Americans could not even locate China on a map, the United States deeply sympathised with the plight of the Chinese people.

Chiang Kai-shek was often portrayed as a valiant warrior standing tall against Japanese aggression. Politically, the “China Lobby” – comprised of Chiang’s sympathisers, business leaders and the faith community fascinated by the idea of a Christian leader creating a vast new Christian nation in the Far East – was one of the most influential political forces in Washington, with unparalleled access to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.

Within the administration, a group of bureaucrats, policymakers and pundits who some historians have referred to as the “Washington Warriors” held sway in the capital’s power centres. They pushed for a more hawkish foreign policy aimed at confronting both Nazi Germany across the Atlantic and Imperial Japan in the east.

At the heart of the policy debate on Japan was oil. Most of the oil that lubricated the Japanese war machine came from the US, and Roosevelt was pressed to cut off the supply. It is commonly held that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour was in response to the American oil embargo, but this is not exactly what happened.

Roosevelt was opposed to an oil embargo. His attention was focused elsewhere, on the events across the Atlantic. He believed that denial of oil would cause Japan to invade the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This would then force the US to defend its allies in the South Pacific, primarily Australia, which the British Navy could no longer defend.
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