Sarah Paine

Think about, let's talk about sunk costs.

And I'm going to talk about sunk casualties.

By the time you're there, the Japanese have suffered 600,000 casualties in China.

There is no easy out of that one.

And so the United States' minimum program is you get out of China.

Not happening if you're Japanese.

You look at the government, the government's definitely on death ground with that one because there's no way they stay in power if they get out of China.

And particularly, this is why Hirohito is Mr. Silent for most of the war.

Initially, he's all for it until it goes sour, and then he's less so.

He knows that he'll be, if not assassinated, declared insane, and then his perfectly serviceable adolescent son, or however old his son was, would be the token emperor.

So I don't think no matter the Zoom call is not going to change the fundamentally high stakes that are involved for both sides.

Yeah, early on.

Oh, there's another piece.

Let's look at the United States in 1941.

Great Depression, isolationists.

This is where the first America firsters are.

They're the ones who created the idea.

They didn't want to know about all these foreign places.

The totally isolationist, Hawaii wasn't even a state, doesn't become a state until 1959.

If you're Japanese, you'll get a place, oh, it's a colony.