And so even though this is a subject about which I'm deeply interested, I'm going to resist characterizing the book one way or the other, beyond saying that I am generally skeptical of history from the top-down. I think leaders are more reactive to public pressures and public-driven events than they would care to admit. This could be said without too much trepidation about the decision to go to war in 1898 and about the decision to occupy the Philippines at large, which was not a matter of public debate, but of over-eager American soldiers. I would be reluctant about any analysis that places paramount importance on the idea that racism was all that well intellectually developed in terms of an "Aryan mythology" during the period, and was much more a matter of a base sense of superiority grounded in skin color and cultural sensibility.
Here is something from HNN that I found questioning some of the diplomatic analysis:
Wednesday, December 9, 2009 - 12:02
What Historians Make of James Bradley's Claims About Teddy Roosevelt's Responsibility for Pearl Harbor
Jonathan Tremblay
Mr. Tremblay is an HNN intern and Breaking News Editor.
James Bradley, in his recent book The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, alleges that President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged Japanese imperialism. Bradley argues that the Taft-Katsura agreement reached between the United States and Japan in 1905 amounted to a ‘secret treaty’ that left the door open to Japanese imperialism in the Far East and even led to the fateful bombing of Pearl Harbor 68 years ago.
Bradley has repeated these arguments in an op ed in the New York Times and in an interview with HNN. Criticism and controversy are building around these claims.
More:
http://hnn.us/articles/121196.htmlHere are a couple works (two classic, two current) you might find to be more academic in their approach to this subject:
I really do think we're still awaiting a good synthesis of the orthodox, revisionist, post-revisionist, and post-orthodox accounts that variously ascribe "American imperialism" to have been non-existent, bold-faced, bold-faced but absent-minded, and non-existent and absent-minded. The truth lies somewhere in between, and it is clear that although Roosevelt and his cohort were important and did guide policy, that something deep-down in the American spirit allowed them to achieve this coup. How that relates to the rat race diplomatically in the Asia-Pacific is certainly a curious subject, and any good analysis of this would have to run from the imperial contact until the formation of the Axis Alliance.
= new reply since forum marked as read
