Saturday marks the 83 anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a stunning assault on a major U.S. Naval base that devastated U.S. military power in the Pacific and drew the country into the largest war the world has ever seen.
And while it is critical to remember all those who died in the attack and the deadly aftermath as we joined a global conflagration, it seems particularly worth recalling in this time of escalating tensions just how quickly distant fighting can be brought home.
In that single, daring Japanese raid, more than 180 U.S. aircraft were destroyed, 2,393 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. It stood as the deadliest foreign attack against the U.S. in history until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The background history matters because — despite the way warfare has become exponentially more lethal — the basics of human motivation to war remain similar. Past can very much be prologue.
Japan had become an aggressive power, overrun most of China and maintained rule in a brutal fashion. Future enemies — The Nationalist Army of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist forces of Mao Tse-tung— allied to drive the Japanese out. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt opted to help China with economic warfare (via embargoes) against Japan, and the “Land of the Rising Sun” found itself mired in a Chinese war it couldn’t win. It faced the choice of a negotiated settlement or doubling down on the military option.
Pearl Harbor was the latter. It knocked the U.S. military out of the way, at least for a spell, as Japan launched a massive offensive, overrunning European and colonial lands in Asia, Hong Kong, Malay, the Philippines and more. Japan allied with Nazi Germany. FDR’s effort to keep the U.S. directly out of the war collapsed, and the aftermath reverberates to this day.
Countless “what ifs” exist. What if the U.S. had more strongly supported China’s right to oppose foreign aggression? What if the Pacific fleet and other military resources had been more dispersed — both around Hawaii itself and more broadly around that side of the globe — to avoid such single-assault devastation? What parts of U.S. intelligence failures could have easily been avoided? The list is long, especially if you consider all that happened up to that point in Europe.
Today we have seen ruthless Russian aggression in Ukraine and repeated saber rattling against anyone who helps defend it, including the U.S. We have large segments of our population, including many prominent politicians, clambering to stay out of it and keep “America First.” We watch as Russia and China move from fearing each other to pronouncing mutual support. International pariah North Korea is apparently sending munitions and men to the Russian war of choice. And Western allies respond in fits and starts.
Amid all of this, our country’s most powerful ally in the Mideast, Israel, fights a hot war with intractable enemies while struggling to balance its own survival with protection of innocents in the battle zones.
We do not pretend to have answers to today’s complicated global problems. We do strongly caution against accepting simplistic answers offered by anyone in power or seeking it. And as we commemorate what was truly a “Day of Infamy” for the United States and the world more than four score years ago, we should keep in mind that it was the result of many other earlier decisions regarding distant conflicts that — until Dec. 7, 1941 — seemed primarily the far-off problems of others.
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