During World War II, Lend-Lease aid on Soviet-reflagged Liberty ships sailed across the hotly contested Pacific with cargoes specifically tailored to prepare the neutral Soviet Union for its coming war with Imperial Japan. This was a closely guarded secret because of the extreme vulnerability of both Russia's land and sea lines of communication to preemptive action by even the severely weakened Japanese. After the war, this and other secret US-Soviet initiatives that took place were not something that either government, each for its own reasons, wanted to draw any attention. Down the "memory hole" it all went, skewing what historians, be they critics or defenders of President Harry S. Truman's use of atomic bombs against Japan, thought they knew about his, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin's actions in the war's final ten months. Both the U.S. State and Defense departments' quiet release of this information in 1955 went essentially unnoticed. The U.S. State Department, Army, and Navy historical branches as well as presidential libraries piecemealed out more over the coming decades and briefly, after Glasnost, additional documents came available from the Russian Federation itself, all having no effect whatsoever as the narratives frozen. This article explains how World War II and Cold War historiography was distorted by these omissions.
This article argues that the firebombing of Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945 inaugurated a new moral phase of the Pacific War in which U.S. air and naval forces waged war with impunity. During the spring and summer of 1945, combat over and around Japan became increasingly one-sided. By the end of July, U.S. B-29s were daily wiping out entire cities at minimal human cost to the United States. In August, asymmetric American warfare culminated in the use of atomic bombs to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki without any reciprocal casualties. Japanese hawks had hoped to force a final land battle so long and bloody that the United States would retreat from unconditional surrender but the atomic obliteration of whole cities without any reciprocal losses proved irresistible and overthrew the hard-liners' plans for peace with honor. Ironically, however, war with impunity became so one-sided that it challenged the Just War Tradition and the principle of reciprocity, creating a disturbing and unexpected moral dilemma for President Harry S. Truman. His wrestle with the morality of using atomic bombs marked the first inchoate steps toward the eventual transformation of American warfare that war with impunity began.
Abstract Charles L. Glaser’s proposed “grand bargain” between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over Taiwan rests on fundamental miscalculations. Since 2015, when Glaser first argued that the United States should relinquish protection of Taiwan in exchange for Beijing’s accommodation of U.S. interests elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, geopolitical tensions only have demonstrated further the salience of the commitment problem. Rooted in James D. Fearon’s rationalist model of war and Brian C. H. Fong’s neo-offensive realism, this research note posits that an agreement between a declining hegemon and a rising revisionist power cannot withstand shifting balances of power and U.S.-PRC mistrust. Taiwan is not only critical to U.S. first island chain containment strategy but also the manufacturing hub of the semiconductors underpinning technological and military supremacy. Glaser fails to account for the PRC’s history of treaty violations, the structural conditions driving its expansionism, and the broader ambitions of the “axis of upheaval,” including Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Rather than mollify Chinese revisionism, a grand bargain would undermine U.S. credibility among allies and embolden Beijing to accelerate regional dominance. As a broken deal would leave the United States worse off, strategic ambiguity—while imperfect—remains the best path forward for U.S. policymakers seeking deterrence and stability in the Indo-Pacific.
On 29 June 1946, just a day before the first U.S. atomic test at Bikini Atoll, the U.S. and British governments released three separate reports on the effects of the atomic bomb. The same-day issuance of these reports that the British Mission to Japan, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), and the U.S. Army's Special Manhattan Engineer District (MED) Investigating Group had written was not coincidental. The British government proposed a synchronized publication of the British Mission and the USSBS reports as white papers, and the U.S. government agreed. This article reconstructs the untold history behind these concurrent events. It highlights Britain's paradoxical pursuit of international control of atomic energy and its pragmatic path toward nuclear development. Britain hoped to leverage its wartime partnership with the United States, which was moving toward a policy of nuclear monopoly, to achieve this goal. On the other hand, the anticipated authority and attention accorded to a white paper sparked confrontations in the United States-one between the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy, the other between the MED and the USSBS. Through close examination of archival materials, this article sheds new light on postwar Anglo-U.S. nuclear relations, inter-service rivalry, and contestation over public memory.
Abstract Scholarship on postwar U.S. Occupation of Japan invariably has held that it “reversed course” in 1947-1948, as the United States pivoted from reforming an erstwhile enemy to rehabilitating a Cold War ally; for business, this “reversal” involved an about-face from dismantling large companies to promoting their recovery. This article suggests the need to revise in two respects the “reverse course” narrative. On one hand, several divisions within Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) headquarters in Tokyo resisted the Antitrust Division’s effort to break up big corporations under its purview, helping delay such action until Washington shifted policy. On the other hand, thousands of Japanese companies reorganized voluntarily after 1948, including over a hundred firms that Antitrust originally had slated for dismemberment. Internal SCAP resistance therefore helped to limit the direct impact of the U.S. Occupation’s business-busting programs, but the voluntary reorganizations of Japanese firms, which still required Antitrust Division approval, meant that the U.S. Occupation played a considerable indirect role in reducing business concentration and promoting competition in the postwar Japanese economy.
In 1963, the United States introduced a jury system in Okinawa, which was under the occupation of the United States since the end of World War II. This system was distinct from the U.S. jury system in that it permitted the participation of aliens as jurors and was more progressive in that the same jury selection process chose women as well as men at that time. This article elucidates the reason for its creation and its significance from the perspective of the involvement of Judge Russell L. Stevens. Although the Okinawan people persistently had advocated for autonomy and their rights, the scope of U.S. control constrained these efforts. However, this limitation was not exclusive to Okinawans; it also existed among individuals in positions of authority within the administration. This structure gave rise to the democratic jury system. This article demonstrates that Judge Stevens, in his limited authority under the U.S. Civil Administration, played a pivotal role in the development of the jury system. He presided over the first jury trial and established the foundation for a series of impartial procedures, including fair jury selection. Through his expertise and enthusiasm, Judge Stevens successfully implemented this radical experiment to establish a democratic and progressive jury system within the restricted framework of U.S. control over Okinawa.
Consensus on why President William McKinley annexed the Philippines in 1898 is far from achievement, and scholars, both political scientists and historians, have since debated the reasons behind this significant decision. This essay reviews and engages with one of the most recent contributions to date to this debate.
George H. Kerr did not publish Formosa Betrayed , his 1965 book about the Guomindang’s early rule over postwar Taiwan and U.S. inaction during the 1947 massacre of thousands of Taiwanese people, until almost twenty years after those events. While scholars and pundits hold various theories about the reasons for the apparent delay, few have paid attention to Kerr’s attempts to write about Taiwan for the Institute of Pacific Relations ( ipr ) in the early years of the Cold War. Between 1947 and 1952, Kerr worked on two books, one arguing for the importance of Taiwan to postwar reconstruction in the Western Pacific, the other a more “polemical” study about the 1947 massacres that he had witnessed as a diplomat in Taiwan. Correspondence between Kerr and ipr Secretary-General William L. Holland reveals that several factors prevented Kerr from publishing an account about postwar Taiwan when it might have made the most difference – his inability to meet the ipr ’s scholarly, objective expectations; his concerns about the ipr ’s reputation during the McCarthy era; and the developing consensus in the United States that Taiwan was no longer a contentious issue. This article also explores why Kerr later constructed a different narrative about his failed publication efforts.
Chen Hengzhe, a female intellectual of the May Fourth era, overcame gender barriers to formal education in early Republican China and leveraged her studies at Vassar College (1915–1919) and the University of Chicago (1919–1920) to become China’s first female history professor. Benefiting from the close-knit academic community at elite U.S. higher educational institutions, she built a transnational network of mentors and friends. Upon her return to China, under the influence of prominent historians James Breasted, James Robinson, and others, as well as H. G. Wells’s newly published Outline of History and Hendrik van Loon’s The Story of Mankind , she wrote her bestselling two-volume high school textbook titled Xiyang shi ( History of Western Countries ). Although this book blended the author’s personal narrative with translations of English texts, it received authoritative acclaim for its originality and up-to-date knowledge. Yet her experiences as a historian revealed the constraints on women’s academic advancement and the tension between domestic responsibilities and an academic career in the culture and society of Republican China.
According to recent theories on the intersection of status and race, a combination of a rising power's pursuit of status and its encounter with the racial hierarchy at the international level does not bode well. This is the case because one can assume that such moments drive a rising power to be more aggressive. Given Japan's racial humiliation associated with the rejection of its racial equality proposal at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 and the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924 in the United States, why did Japan concede to an inferior ratio in naval size and remain committed to the Washington naval system from 1921 to 1930? Why by the early 1930s did Japan profoundly overturn its status policy and not earlier? Drawing on critical appraisals of the theories that address a rising power's status and its racial anxiety, this article argues that Japan's orthodox foreign policy idea prioritized its higher civilizational status relative to the Western great powers and the rest of East Asia, which generated an elite consensus among civilian and military leaders on accepting the trade-off between reduced military capabilities and increased status from 1921 to 1930 despite racial humiliation. Japan's status-driven restraint persisted until this elite consensus collapsed and the political-economic consequences of the Showa Depression defeated social expectations.
