Sarah Paine

So now everybody's got high tariffs.

Well, here's trade dependent Japan that's always cooperated with everybody and suddenly they're toast.

And so their solution is autarky and they need an empire large enough to be autarkic.

And so then that's when they invade Manchuria in 1931.

So Chiang Kai-shek has all of a sudden lost this area from China that's greater than Germany and France combined.

It's a mess.

And so he's trying to balance what to do about Japanese versus communist.

The Japanese don't quit with Manchuria.

They stabilize the place.

They make massive infrastructure developments.

They transform it into the most developed part of Asia outside of the home islands, but they keep on going.

And it gets so bad that the communists and the nationalists form a second united front because they're facing this lethal threat called Japan.

And they organized that in December 1936 in what's known as the Xi'an incident.

And the Japanese react viscerally because they look at it and the nationalists have gone over to the dark side because they've joined up with the communists.

And this is when the Japanese escalate in 1937, go down the Chinese coast, up the Yangtze River.

And well, but then they wind up stalemating.

Once they get beyond the Chinese railway system, which isn't that great in this period, the Japanese can't stabilize the place and the Soviets start adding more aid and we add more aid.

It's a mess.

The Japanese decide they're going to cut Western aid to the Chinese, and that's where Pearl Harbor comes in.

That's what the attack of Pearl Harbor is all about, is telling Americans to stay out of Asia, which of course, you know, we did just the opposite.