Isoroku Yamamoto experienced his own awakening to American power as a Japanese student at Harvard after World War I and again as a naval attache in Washington. America’s geographic magnitude impressed him, as did its bounteous natural resources, thrumming factories and energetic population. Yamamoto remained a Japanese patriot but one chastened by exposure to the actuality of Japan’s Pacific rival.

His insight made him odious to the ultranationalists who controlled Japan’s army during the 1930s. Despite attaining high rank in the navy, Yamamoto feared for his life. Indeed he was promoted to commander of the navy in part to keep him at sea and out of the reach of assassins.

The jingo generals had been itching for a fight against the United States since Theodore Roosevelt brokered an end to the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The terms of the deal were realistic, but Japanese expectations had been unrealistic, and the jingoes blamed America.

They were further miffed when the United States refused to recognize Japan’s seizure of Manchuria from China in the early 1930s. The generals wanted nothing more for Japan and East Asia than the United States enjoyed in the Americas, they said, calling for a Japanese version of the Monroe Doctrine.

Tensions escalated after Japan invaded China proper in 1937. Franklin Roosevelt ordered sanctions against Japan, eventually including embargoes on oil and steel.

The generals understood this as a death sentence on their expansionist dreams. Refusing to go quietly, they plotted a thrust into the Dutch East Indies, as Indonesia was then called. The archipelago had oil and iron, and it afforded a launching pad to the Middle East, which had even more oil.

The generals understood that such a move might provoke the United States to war. Their answer was to strike America first, paralyze its Pacific fleet, and entrench in the Indies before the Americans could recoup and launch a counteroffensive. By then Washington would conclude that the Indies weren’t worth the cost of their liberation. Hadn’t the United States and the other great powers come to terms with Japan’s seizure of Manchuria?

Yamamoto said the generals didn’t understand the American mind. “Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States,” he predicted, “it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines”—American outposts in the western Pacific—“nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”

Yamamoto’s warning was denounced as more of his defeatism. Planning proceeded for a campaign in the East Indies.

Yamamoto proposed to make the best of the bad situation. If there must be war with the Americans, Japan should strike the first blow. The American bases in the Philippines were likely targets. But precisely because they were likely, Yamamoto reasoned that they would be well defended. Better to attack the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was so far off the route to the Indies that the American forces there could be taken by surprise.

The attack went forward and the surprise was essentially complete. The heart of America’s Pacific battleship fleet was destroyed. By luck, the American aircraft carriers were on patrol and beyond the reach of the Japanese bombs and torpedoes.

Yamamoto reckoned that the successful attack had bought Japan time. But not much. “I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year,” he said, “but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years.”

Six months was all he got. In June 1942, American ships and planes defeated their Japanese counterparts in the pivotal battle of Midway, reversing Japan’s momentum and throwing its navy on the defensive.

Japan never regained the initiative. The abundant resources Yamamoto had seen in the United States were mobilized and brought to bear against Japanese forces. Slowly at first, then faster, American forces drove the Japanese back toward the home islands. Massive bombing raids obliterated much of Tokyo and other cities. Finally, in the summer of 1945 American planes dropped two atom bombs, one on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered and the war ended.

Yamamoto didn’t live to see the outcome he had predicted. In April 1943, after American cryptanalysts cracked a message containing Yamamoto’s itinerary, American warplanes intercepted a bomber carrying the admiral over the Solomon Islands.

“To die for Emperor and Nation is the highest hope of a military man,” Yamamoto had said. What he thought about dying for a mistake he had warned against is unclear. At the fatal hour he didn’t have time for reflection. He was hit by the initial burst of gunfire from one of the American P-38s and died before his plane crashed into the ground.

Coming on May 12: American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777764/american-patriarch-by-h-w-brands/

By the beginning of 1941, Adolf Hitler had ample reason to heed his own inner voice against the objections of naysayers. His rise to power in Germany had confounded critics who treated him as a clown and his Nazi party as a gang of misfits. His challenge to the Versailles regime imposed on Germany at the end of World War I had elicited warnings that France and Britain would take action to enforce the terms of the German surrender, perhaps with armed force. But Paris and London had let the violations pass. His demand for the return of the Sudetenland from Czechoslavakia again evoked warnings that he was going too far, but again the Western powers yielded. They didn’t yield when Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland, but the army he had created in violation of Versailles swept France aside in six weeks, and the air force pounded Britain to within an inch of its life.

Yet his principal goal remained unachieved. Hitler resented German dependence of foreign countries for food, oil and other essentials of modern national life. For decades he had looked to the east to supply these. He spoke the language of lebensraum—living space—for Germans to expand into, at the same time freeing themselves from foreign dependence. The invasion of Poland had been an important step in this direction. But beyond Poland lay the vast space and resources of Russia and its dependencies.

A nonaggression agreement with Stalin stood in the way. But Hitler had never thought of this as more than an expedient, a buffer between the German forces who entered Poland from the west and Soviet troops who invaded from the east. Hitler hadn’t wanted war with Russia then.

But he did now. His western front was secure. France was under German control, and Britain was digging out from the bombing. America was a wild card. It had become a de facto ally of Britain, providing destroyers that complicated the German submarine campaign against British shipping. The American president, Roosevelt, appeared willing for war against Germany. But the American public would require a pretext.

The window was open for an eastern thrust. It wouldn’t stay open forever. Britain would recover. Roosevelt would find his pretext. If Germany was ever going to get its lebensraum, it had to act now.

The naysayers, predictably, said it couldn’t be done. Hitler’s diplomats contended that the deal with Russia had worked well and shouldn’t be thrown over. Germany could get the wheat it needed from Ukraine and the oil from the Caucasus better by cooperation with Moscow than by war, which would certainly disrupt supply chains in the short term.

Hitler’s generals warned that Russia wouldn’t be easy to conquer. The German blitzkrieg had worked against France because distances in the west were comparatively short. Russian geography was of a different scale. The very effort to seize Russia’s resources would require more resources than Germany could mobilize at once. And if the Russian campaign didn’t succeed at once, Russian distances and the Russian winter would swallow German forces as they had swallowed the forces of Napoleon. In the meantime, Britain would recover and America might enter the war.

Hitler wouldn’t listen, any more than he had listened to the critics who had said he couldn’t get to where he already was. Fortune favors the bold, not the timid. He ordered the campaign against Russia—Barbarossa—to begin.

In doing so he sealed the fate of the Third Reich. After initial victories that carried German forces to the gates of Moscow, the factors the skeptics had identified kicked in. German supply lines strained under their great length. The winter punished exposed German troops. America added Russia to the list of Lend-Lease recipients. Russian generals proved as stubborn and resourceful against Hitler as they had been against Napoleon.

The war between Germany and Russia became the largest land war in history, and the 1943 battle of Kursk the largest battle in history. The Russian victory in that battle broke the back of the Germany army, almost a year before America and Britain opened a second front in France in 1944. A year after that, Hitler’s reich lay in ruins.

Could the outcome of the war have been different?

Possibly, if Hitler had listened to those who said Russia was a campaign too far.

But if Hitler had been one to heed skeptics, he never would have reached the pinnacle of German politics and never been in a position to decide for or against Barbarossa. Hubris was what made Hitler Hitler, and what brought him down.

Their attempt was not simply futile but stunningly counterproductive. In the war triggered by the secession effort, the Southern interpretation of states’ rights was utterly discredited and slavery wholly destroyed. No greater blunder has occurred in American history.

Southern leaders should have known better. Secession had been an idée fixe among South Carolinians for decades. They resented the 1820 Missouri Compromise for declaring most of the Louisiana Purchase off limits to slavery. In 1832, under the goading of John Calhoun, whose aspirations for president had been foiled by Andrew Jackson, South Carolina’s legislature nullified an 1828 tariff and threatened secession. Jackson girded for war. Henry Clay of Kentucky brokered a compromise that phased out the tariff and rescinded nullification. Most of the country called it a draw, but the South Carolinians claimed victory. They grew more bumptious than ever.

Some of them wanted to secede in 1850, after another Clay compromise admitted California as a free state, tipping the balance in Congress to the North. The accompanying Fugitive Slave Act satisfied other Southerners, but the South Carolinia fire-eaters deemed it no more than their due. Yet the rest of the state hesitated, and secession hung fire.

The radicals got their way in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected president. No sooner had the result become official than a South Carolina convention proclaimed secession. Six other states, all of the Deep South, soon followed and linked arms in the Confederate States of America.

Their common justification was the compact interpretation of the Constitution, which characterized the Union as an alliance of states rather than an amalgamation of peoples. What the states had made, the states could unmake. Secession was the basic right of all states.

Their common complaint, and the cause of their invoking the right of secession, was the threat they perceived to slavery. Lincoln’s party, the Republicans, were on record as opposing slavery. The Republicans didn’t propose to ban it in the states, but they determined to keep it out of the federal territories. The secessionists dismissed the distinction as political hogwash. They called the Republicans abolitionists and said slavery was no longer safe within the boundaries of the United States. Hence their departure.

They all hoped, and many of them expected, that the North wouldn’t fight to keep the South in the Union. Some in the North were happy to see the slaveholders go. But Lincoln took the opposite view and prepared for war. When South Carolina militia clashed with federal troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston, the fighting began.

Lincoln’s initial war aim was to preserve the Union. Slavery had nothing to do with the matter, he said. Yet the war went slowly for the Northern side, and a year into the fighting, the Southern war for the right of secession and the preservation of slavery appeared likely to be a success.

Everything hinged on politics, in particular the willingness of Northern voters to stick with Lincoln and the president’s war effort. Lincoln didn’t help his cause by his denial that the war was about slavery. Everybody knew that slavery had prompted Southern secession. Lincoln himself admitted that slavery was the underlying cause of the war. His reluctance to make emancipation a war aim reflected both his narrow reading of the Constitution and his desire not to drive the four border states—slave states that remained loyal to the Union—into the arms of the Confederacy.

Lincoln at length decided to take a stronger position against slavery. In September 1862 he announced that as of January 1, 1863, slaves in the rebel states would be freed. On that New Year’s Day, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

This provided clarity but not yet victory. Northerners now knew they were fighting for both the Union and freedom, but they still had to win the fight. Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the summer of 1863 gave cause for hope. But lack of progress by Ulysses Grant against Robert E. Lee in Virginia the following year raised the possibility that Northern resolve would give way. Lincoln himself doubted he would win reelection in 1864. George McClellan, his likely successor, would be tempted to offer the Confederacy a compromise peace.

It didn’t come to that. Union victories by William Sherman at Atlanta and Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley heartened Lincoln’s supporters and carried him to a second term.

This sealed the fate of the Confederacy. The end came in April 1865 at Appomattox, where Lee surrendered to Grant.

The Confederacy lay in ruins, its war purposes smashed. Secession, a defensible theory before 1861, had none to even mention it now. Slavery, whose existence in the Southern states had been secure before the war, was gone with the wind.

The leaders of the Confederacy had gambled everything on one prediction: that the North wouldn’t fight for the Union. As people do, the Confederates read from their own hearts into the hearts of others. They didn’t value the Union, so they assumed Northerners didn’t either—at least not enough to defend it with arms. Anyone could see that the North would win if it really wanted to. Its wealth and numbers far surpassed those of the South. The North did want to win, and it won.

The outcome included an irony. As stinging as defeat was to the rebels, it likely yielded a better outcome than victory would have. In defeat, the American South benefited from the modernization that swept across America in the decades after the war. In victory, the Confederacy, still clinging to slavery and self-exiled from the American marketplace, would have missed out. Quite possibly Virginia, with strong prewar ties to the North, would have found its way back to the Union, depriving the Confederacy of its largest, wealthiest member.

Confederate secession was a monumental blunder. But it could have been even worse.

So said Talleyrand on learning that Napoleon had executed a rival. The statement summarizes the view that for leaders of great nations, violations of interest are more serious than violations of morality. It is a cynical approach but not an illogical one.

The crimes of national leaders are too many to document. Their grievous blunders are fewer but more instructive. In this and occasional essays to follow, some of the whoppers of history will be identified and dissected.

Britain’s loss of the American colonies

In 1773 Benjamin Franklin penned a satire under the label: “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.” In it, Franklin characterized the attitudes and actions of King George and the British Parliament that had increasingly alienated the American colonists during the previous decade. “Take special care the provinces are never incorporated with the mother country, that they do not enjoy the same common rights, the same privileges in commerce, and that they are governed by severer laws, all of your enacting, without allowing them any share in the choice of the legislators,” Franklin wrote.

He proceeded through the taxes imposed on Americans without their consent, the corruption of their courts, and the sidelining of their assemblies. “Send armies into their country under pretence of protecting the inhabitants,” Franklin added, referring to the most recent aggravation. “Invest the general of your army in the provinces with great and unconstitutional powers, and free him from the control of even your own civil governors.”

By this means, said Franklin, the British government would ensure the hostility of the colonists, who might then take their fate into their own hands. “You will that day (if you have not done it sooner) get rid of the trouble of governing them, and all the plagues attending their commerce and connection from thenceforth and for ever.”

George and his ministers should have paid attention. Franklin’s warning came not from an enemy of the British empire but from one of its enthusiasts. Franklin thought the empire was the best thing going. His dream was that the British government in London would have the vision to appreciate what the American colonies could become: a powerful extension of Britain itself. The only thing wanting was the willingness of London to treat the Americans as equals to Britons living at home. Fix that, said Franklin, and the empire would long endure.

But such willingness was precisely what proved lacking in British policy. George and Parliament insisted on treating the Americans as subordinates. In the British view, the purpose of colonies was to promote the prosperity and strength of the mother country. The interests of the Americans ran a distant second to the interests of Britain itself.

To be fair to the British, Franklin was asking what empires had never done. The point of empires had always been the aggrandizement of the imperial power, not the welfare of the provinces. In Britain’s case, if the Americans got what they were demanding, the Irish would demand similar equal treatment. To most Britons, who thought of the Irish as hardly better than barbarians—and Roman Catholic to boot—equality for the Irish was inconceivable.

Yet Franklin’s argument wasn’t outlandish. The American colonies were different from Ireland, and from most colonies of most empires. The inhabitants of the American colonies were overwhelmingly British, emigrants from Britain and their children, in a way the inhabitants of Ireland were not. The American colonies were colonies of settlement, not merely of conquest. The demise of the Indians, mostly from disease, left few non-British inhabitants to be ruled. To be sure, the southern colonies included African slaves, but nobody, including Franklin, considered them part of the political conversation.

As a result, though Franklin was asking a lot, he wasn’t asking the impossible. And he wasn’t asking any more than what he believed was in the interest of Britain itself.

The British themselves eventually agreed, but only after two wars and a dozen decades. The American Revolution cost Britain the colonies and a fortune besides. It also set in motion events that led to the French Revolution, which produced two decades of additional war, besides the War of 1812 against America. During America’s Civil War, America and Britain almost came to blows again.

But finally, in the late 19th century, British leaders recognized that cultivating the Americans rather than antagonizing them made sense. During the 20th century what was often called the “special relationship” made America and Britain allies in two world wars and for decades after.

The result was an informal version of the transatlantic Anglo-American partnership Franklin had advocated in the 18th century.

If only George and Parliament had listened.