The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

[Ghent12]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

We've already talked about this.

It had a little to do with Japan, and a lot to do with British and American economic warfare.

The rest was just a result of operations.

Ah yes, more of the "nobody is truly in control of their own actions" type of memes.

[c1ue]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

Ah yes, more of the "nobody is truly in control of their own actions" type of memes.

What exactly are you trying to say?

I've never said Japan was right in attacking Pearl Harbor; what I said above is that there were clear logical reasons why Japan did so, and prominent among them was economic provocation/warfare by the United States and UK.

To go from that to "it isn't Japan's fault" is just as ludicrous as saying "Japan was wrong in attacking China in 1936" but ignoring the literal waves of attempts by mainland China to attack Japan.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

I didn't know that Japan was threatenedy by China in the 1930's. Have to read up on that.
However, the economic sanctions against Japan were supposedly because of thier growing empire
in the far east. It was supposed to be a peaceful way of containing this belligerent nation.
The US should have expected a military response, and the Pearl Harbor defenses were badly
mismanaged.

[Slimprofits]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

Sanctions are ALWAYS an act of war. Only an act of Orwellian redefinition can change that reality.

[Scot]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

Sanctions are ALWAYS an act of war. Only an act of Orwellian redefinition can change that reality.

The collective refusal of a nation to economically cooperate or assist or help another nation is not an attack and is certainly not an act of war.

[jk]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

The collective refusal of a nation to economically cooperate or assist or help another nation is not an attack and is certainly not an act of war.

i believe there was a blockade of others' commerce involved.

[c1ue]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

I didn't know that Japan was threatenedy by China in the 1930's.

Japan and China have had an adversarial relationship for literally thousands of years.

The term Kamikaze in fact arose from a typhoon sinking a Chinese invasion fleet.

It was only after the Meiji Restoration that Japan was in a position to repay its centuries of being bullied by China.

It was supposed to be a peaceful way of containing this belligerent nation.

I recommend you read up on the history more. In fact Japan had signed commercial agreements to buy literally millions of barrels of US oil and oil products; these were all either unilaterally abrogated or held up by deliberate US internal bureaucracy.

It was this act which the scholars agree - on both sides of the Pacific - which prompted Japan's leadership to consider other actions. In fact it was this act which allowed the militant faction within Japanese politics to gain ascendancy.

There is no question Japan was belligerent, but that isn't the issue. In the same period, Germany was belligerent but didn't undergo any embargoes.

In fact there were far more provocations than the oil embargo.

The Flying Tigers, for example, was a cadre of US pilots and airplanes supplied to China to fight the Japanese 6 months before Pearl Harbor.

Germany and the Soviet Union both also supplied Chiang Kai Shek in order to 'contain' Japan.

The collective refusal of a nation to economically cooperate or assist or help another nation is not an attack and is certainly not an act of war.

If your nation is 80% dependent on oil imports, and your largest supplier just canceled all its previously signed agreements with you to supply oil, do you consider this an act of peace?

And what if said supplier also sent its military aircraft and pilots specifically to fight your forces?

[Slimprofits]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

the economic sanctions against Japan were supposedly because of thier growing empire
in the far east. It was supposed to be a peaceful way of containing this belligerent nation.
The US should have expected a military response,

If the US should have expected a military response, than it wasn't a peaceful action.

Sanctions are almost always a step on the way up to military engagement of some kind. Are there any examples of this not being true?

The collective refusal of a nation to economically cooperate or assist or help another nation is not an attack and is certainly not an act of war.

If two entities are not cooperating and they're also not ignoring each other, than what is the state of their relationship?

Sanctions are not ignoring.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

The US should have expected Japan to make a military response, because Japan was using it's military very aggressively to expand territory. Piss them off for any reason, expect them to attack you.

I have an old fashioned view that war always involves people being shot at, explosives going off, occupation of foreign soil, etc.
Cutting off oil just does not count. They were not using that much oil to grow thier rice, so it was harldy life threatening.


The oil export termination possibly should have been handled differently, but letting a cruel empire like Japan buy critical resources without limit is unethical!

Supplying CKS was participating in war, but CKS was not exactly invading Japan!

[jpatter666]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

The US should have expected Japan to make a military response, because Japan was using it's military very aggressively to expand territory. Piss them off for any reason, expect them to attack you.

I have an old fashioned view that war always involves people being shot at, explosives going off, occupation of foreign soil, etc.
Cutting off oil just does not count. They were not using that much oil to grow thier rice, so it was harldy life threatening.


The oil export termination possibly should have been handled differently, but letting a cruel empire like Japan buy critical resources without limit is unethical!

Supplying CKS was participating in war, but CKS was not exactly invading Japan!

The US did expect Japan to attack -- but they thought the Philippines. They got caught with their pants down at Pearl Harbor also I think most here are aware how scandalously close the US came to it being the other way around. Luck often plays a major factor in war.

So far as sanctions and oil are concerned, should the US have responded differently to the 1973 oil embargo then? I suppose you could make a similar comparison to the US and Saudi Arabia now. If Saudi suddenly got off all oil exports to the West (I'll say West instead of US since yes, we don't get nearly as much from them) how would the Western Powers respond?

I'd imagine not very well.....

[c1ue]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

The US should have expected Japan to make a military response, because Japan was using it's military very aggressively to expand territory. Piss them off for any reason, expect them to attack you.

Um, ok. So the US' naked imperialistic grab for Spanish possessions in the Pacific a mere generation prior (i.e. the Spanish American War of 1898) which netted the US the Phillipines, Guam, and Puerto Rico - is ok.

But Naked Japanese aggression is not.

Supplying CKS was participating in war, but CKS was not exactly invading Japan!

Right, so Russian and Chinese advisors and equipment in Vietnam and North Korea as just as equally acts of peace as were American advisors and Stingers in Afghanistan.

[Verrocchio]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

Um, ok. So the US' naked imperialistic grab for Spanish possessions in the Pacific a mere generation prior (i.e. the Spanish American War of 1898) which netted the US the Phillipines, Guam, and Puerto Rico - is ok.

But Naked Japanese aggression is not.

Export controls and embargos (the US 1940 Export Control Act, the 1973 OAPEC Oil Embargo), deception (the Mukden Incident, the Tonkin Gulf Incident of August 4th), proxy wars (US advisers in Afghanistan, as already cited; and treaties (the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce) are all legitimate ways to shape relations with other states. Both Japan and the US ascended to become great powers in the 19th and 20th centuries, although almost every important dimension of their respective economies and cultures stand in contrast. Japan sought to gain control of the resources that were necessary for continued economic expansion, and the US sought to contain an incipient rival. These are legitimate goals of nation-states, and historical precedents aplenty can be found for the means that each nation used to pursue them.

[Woodsman]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

I learned my lesson from the Housing Bubble episode. No policy is too stupid and short-sighted for these guys. Setting us up for a major war then taking us into it represents a continuation of a series of mistakes, consistent with a pattern of errors driven by a set of operands. I will not spell out what the operands are as that is part of the secret sauce of my ten year forecast, but suffice it to say that they are not thinking several moves ahead but only about how to take the piece in front of them.

Our leadership over the past 30 years did not intentionally choose policies that resulted in the current economic crisis. They acted in their perceived self-interest.

There are two kinds of self-interest. Intelligent self-interest that improves your world and self-destructive self-interest that sets it back. Theirs is the latter kind.

The same self-destructive, self-interested leadership that brought you the credit bubble and that spawned the FIRE Economy, are now, via pursuit of disastrously flawed economic recovery policies, in the process of drawing you, your children, and your grandchildren into the next great war. War is the inevitable consequence of the eventual failure of these policies.

They will cause the US to enter a new recession before the output gap created by the last recession closes. The Great Recession will then become a kind of Great Depression II with many of the social stresses and political change that implies.

But The Great Depression didn't cause WWII. It was a catalyst for war.

Several of you have pointed out that the political antecedents for WWII do not exist today. I agree. However, I don't expect a repeat of WWII. I expect a completely different kind of war, just as WWII was a new kind of war.

The antecedent this time is oil supply scarcity. The catalyst will be The Great Depression II and a 20% to 40% decline in US living standards.

There are two dozen factors that will give the great war its unique qualities but consider one in particular that did not exist during WWII: image driven electronic media.

Image driven electronic media is the most efficient machine of mass belief shaping in human history. It will be used by the state to erase old beliefs and create new ones in a matter of days if not hours.

The Chinese system of mass belief formation already in place erased all awareness of the Tienanmen Square massacre. It will be deployed to help China's leadership externalize China's future economic crisis. China's leadership will blame the US for its crisis once its state finance capital based prosperity ends.

Anyone who thinks that China and the US cannot engage in warfare, consider the instances when China and the US recently engaged militarily. Arms and tactics will be unconventional at the outset and confrontations will evolve in unexpected ways.

To sum up my argument: Leadership that is stupid and short sighted enough to let the tech bubble run to its disastrous conclusion, stupid and short sighted enough to let the housing bubble develop to bale the economy out of the tech bubble crash, and then let the housing bubble run to its disastrous conclusion, stupid and short sighted enough to try to restart the FIRE Economy and drive the economy toward a mid-gap recession, at which point a new round of layoffs pushes unemployment to 12% and higher and crushes consumer spending -- such leadership is stupid and short sighted enough to finish the course, to lead the US into wars it cannot win.

Reading this again in light of the recent conversations around the new Cold War and the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin lie.

[Chris]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

Frankly, I have no fingernails left after re-reading that analysis. I recall having a similar feeling of utter helplessness and worry for my children's future the first time I read it.

[shiny!]

Re: The Next Ten Years – Part I: There will be blood - Eric Janszen

Good find, Woodsman. Can you possibly give us the link to that post by EJ?