Sarah Paine

If Hiller had not made that blunder, FDR would have been in a world of trouble trying to explain why he's suddenly going to be fighting Nazis over an attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese.

So that's a separate issue.

The main thing that Americans who thought deeply cared about

is the international system, that we should deal with each other through laws, through freedom of navigation.

So this is how you run your commercial transactions, that big countries don't get to overrun small countries, because if they do, the entire international system goes down.

And the logic that you're describing is excellent logic.

And this is what the Japanese are saying.

It's like, why would the Americans care about this?

Americans care deeply about the international system.

people who are thoughtful about it.

And it's also like, why not let the Russians eat all of Ukraine?

Why are the Europeans suddenly all over this problem, right?

And they've unified very recently on this.

It's because the whole system is at stake.

So it is really high stakes at a strategic level.

The Japanese are looking at the operational level and going, why do you care about these countries?

We care about the entire system because our prosperity is based on it.

That faction had already lost, and they lost in 1936.

Takahashi Korekiyo is Japan's longest serving finance minister, and he was a very distinguished man.

In fact, he brought the Japanese economy out of the Great Depression before anyone in the West was doing it, through government spending and trying to get people to spend at home.