Pearl Harbor and the Strategy of Economic Sanctions

By George Friedman

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There have been many lessons drawn from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One was that wars need not begin according to international law. Another was that attacks can be unexpected and that constant vigilance is necessary. Still another was that underestimating an enemy can be catastrophic. And yet another was that failure to understand how new technology changes the nature of war can be disastrous.

The list of lessons learned is of course longer than the list of lessons remembered, one of which is particularly germane at this moment: When imposing economic sanctions, the more powerful the sanctions, the greater the pressure on your adversary to strike back. At a time when the U.S. is shifting from the use of military force to the use of economic power, the lesson of why Pearl Harbor was attacked needs to be considered carefully.

War Plans

Prior to World War I, Japan was the leading industrial power in the Western Pacific. After World War I, Japan expanded its military sphere of influence. It had sided with the Anglo-French alliance during the war, and as a reward, German holdings in the Western Pacific were turned over to it. This paralleled the growth of Japanese naval power, and it seemed that the American position in the Pacific, built around Hawaii and the Philippines, was in danger.

The United States had developed a series of global war plans after the end of World War I. War Plan Black assumed a war with Germany. War Plan Red assumed a war with Britain (not quite as insane as it sounds, since the U.S. had been dueling with Britain over control of the North Atlantic since its founding). The plan that was taken most seriously was War Plan Orange. For the U.S. Navy, War Plan Orange was the basis of all planning between 1920 and 1941. It assumed that the Japanese would move against the Philippines in order to take control of the resources in present-day Indonesia and Southeast Asia. The U.S. assumed that Japan could not achieve its goals unless the Philippines was in Japanese hands, since ships in the Philippines could cut the flow of supplies to Japan. The U.S. plan was to accept the conquest of the Philippines and then send the U.S. Pacific Fleet, a massive force built around battleships, westward to force the Japanese navy into a decisive battle that the U.S. fleet would win.

The entire premise behind War Plan Orange was that the Japanese had a hunger for raw materials. That was the decisive reality. Japan was a significant industrial power but was bereft of minerals at home. They had to import nearly all the raw materials needed for their domestic industry and defense. The U.S. assumed that at some point Japan would move south and intervened in China to undermine such a move. The U.S. national defense strategy was built not on Europe but on Asia, and on the assumption that Japan would move south.

The Japanese did not move beyond Japan until 1940. They had treaties with both the Netherlands and the French to supply a wide range of raw materials. But the collapse of France and the Netherlands put in question the value of those treaties and posed an existential problem for Japan. Japan saw Indochina as unable to guarantee compliance with the treaties, and so it moved into Indochina. The United States believed that if it simply accepted the move, it would guarantee Japanese control of China and open the door for their expansion into the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean basin.

The U.S. solution to this was actions they regarded as a means short of war. It halted all sale of U.S. oil and scrap metal to Japan and had U.S. agents buy up Indonesian oil not for shipment to the United States but to prevent Japan having access to it. The Americans demanded that Japan withdraw not only from Indochina but from China as a whole. The U.S. sought to put Japan in an impossible spot on the assumption that an aggressive Japanese response would trigger War Plan Orange, force a confrontation with the Japanese fleet somewhere between Taiwan and Borneo, and finish the Japanese.

The Japanese were familiar with the concepts behind War Plan Orange due to numerous naval war games that simulated it. The danger of peacetime readiness is that it reveals the kind of war you expect to fight. The Japanese knew that if they failed to comply with U.S. demands, U.S. sanctions would cripple them at best. But if they did comply with U.S. demands, they would be reduced to an American vassal state.

Their third option was war, but knowing the specifics of U.S. war plans, they would have to fight the war in a way that would deny the U.S. the opportunity to bring its fleet of battleships to bear. They knew that the U.S. expected to lose the Philippines but that the Americans intended the loss to lead to the destruction of the Japanese navy. The Japanese understood the threat that resisting or complying with U.S. sanctions posed, and that war waged as the U.S. expected it to be waged would lead to defeat. The Japanese had hoped to avoid war with the United States, but American sanctions convinced them that the U.S. intended to break Japan. What the U.S. saw as an alternative to war the Japanese saw as forcing their hand.

Most important, they would not fight as War Plan Orange expected. They would not engage the American fleet in a surface battle. Rather than serving as the culmination of war, they decided they had to engage the U.S. fleet as the first act of war. Thus, they chose to use aircraft carriers as the main strike force that would approach from a completely unexpected direction (from the northwest), and try to fight the decisive battle not with a surface fleet against a surface fleet, but with naval air power against a surface fleet in port.

To emphasize, the Japanese did not intend or expect war with the U.S. until the U.S. put sanctions on them. Japan saw itself as maintaining access to raw materials guaranteed by treaty. It saw U.S. sanctions as an attempt to compel Japan to capitulate without engaging in war and capitulation as permanent subordination to the United States. Under this pressure, they chose war but deliberately avoided the war the U.S. had planned. They ultimately lost by underestimating the recuperative power of the United States. But they understood that their core geopolitical problem was lack of resources, which compelled them to capture Southeast Asia.

Economic Warfare

The Japanese could not back off; they had to be aggressive. The United States saw the challenge posed to U.S. security by Japan’s imperative as requiring the imposition of pressure that challenged Japan’s fundamental interests. Rather than capitulating, the Japanese chose to launch a war in a totally unexpected way. The U.S. had constantly signaled how they would wage a war with Japan, and the Japanese adjusted their own war plan in ways the U.S. didn’t expect. The Japanese were aware of the extremely high risk of the war, but thought the U.S. would negotiate rather than try to invade Japanese-held territory. Japan viewed war as less risky than sanctions. Both sides were wrong. The Americans did not anticipate the Japanese response to sanctions directed at fundamental Japanese interests. The Japanese did not understand that after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would wage war asking and giving no quarter.

American strategy during and especially after the Cold War has depended heavily on the use of sanctions. Over the past decade, the U.S. has shifted its posture away from military action toward economic warfare. In China, Iran, Russia, Turkey and numerous other countries, the first American response to divergent interests is not to wage war but to take what is seen as a less threatening step of imposing sanctions. The United States produces nearly 25 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and is the largest importer in the world. This gives it significant options and forces other countries to consider whether complying with U.S. demands is less harmful than the risk of resisting those demands.

The Japanese example is a classic case in which sanctions, deliberately targeted against a country’s core interests, caused the country to choose a military option rather than to duel economically. Tokyo realized it would lose the latter and had a chance with the former. The core lesson of Pearl Harbor was not that economic pressures aren’t a valuable tool, but that the assumption that the adversary would not choose a military response is uncertain. The more effective the sanctions, the greater the chance of a military response. The assumption that the adversary has no military options may be true given expectations of capabilities. But, as with Japan, effective sanctions can compel the other side to develop innovative and painful solutions.

The danger of War Plan Orange was that it drilled into a generation of naval officers a perception of how a war would be fought. The combination of effective sanctions and the gift of a clear understanding of American war plans caused the Japanese to adjourn the economic confrontation and commence an unexpected opening to war.

In undertaking economic sanctions, there must also be parallel and unexpected military options on the table. The predictability of U.S. operational principles allows the enemy to innovate unexpectedly. The assumption that the economic dimension will remain economic because we wish it to fails to understand one of the main lessons of Pearl Harbor.

This is not an argument against economic sanctions; they have been used for decades. It is a warning to carefully select who they are directed against and how they are applied. They can create a situation where the sanctions are so effective that war can seem like an attractive alternative. If such sanctions are required, the U.S. should not expect the enemy to go to war in a way that is most advantageous to the United States. As with Pearl Harbor, the enemy will strike where we least expect and as hard as possible. The more desperate the adversary becomes, the more the military must anticipate an unexpected response.