End of Empires: who and what was responsible? (post WW2)

[Tukhachevskii]

Pt. 1

by Dayuhan
Japan was a rising industrial power, almost devoid of natural resources. With regional resources largely locked up in closed-loop colonial trade[snip].

My understanding of Japanese decision making may not be as thorough as yours but from the authorities I’ve read America’s role in pushing Japan towards war with the “west” (as opposed to Russia) is generally considered important, which see...

[from The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 6] The Japanese army's war plans, reflecting emphases rather than strict numerical priorities, ascribed first importance to the Russians as the potential enemy from the time of the Russo-Japanese War until the birth of the Soviet Union. With the increase in American influence in the Far East attending a deterioration in U.S.-Japanese relations, the United States replaced Russia after 1918 as the main national enemy. (p. 315)

The Japanese national defence policy was revised further in the mid- 1930s. After the breakdown of the naval accords in 1935, the navy in particular stressed the growing danger of American containment. The giant American naval building program, the major American manoeuvres conducted near Midway Island, and espionage reports on the top-secret Orange War Plan alarmed navy leaders. By 1936, the Japanese navy had drawn up new contingency plans based on "defence in the north, advance to the south." In other words, the naval general staff was looking toward Southeast Asia, a zone of special interest to the colonial powers there, especially Britain and Holland. As a result, the British were added to the list of national enemies in the revision of 1936. However, operational planning against England, involving the neutralization of Hong Kong and Singapore, was not introduced until 1939, and anti-Dutch operations not until 1941.(my italics, p.318)

As for Japan’s post-war prosperity you can’t compare the pre-war international system to the post-war one. Nor should one forget the reasons for Japan’s post-war prosperity...the need for the US to have a strong Asian power whose economy was tied into the US thus buttressing and supporting the American world system and forestalling Communism (the same reasoning behind the Marshall Plan); Japan became part of the US informal empire (completing Commodore Perry’s earlier “venture” in 1853). Japan’s current economic woes are part of that post-war legacy too. In fact...

by Dayuhan
How would "letting the US into those markets and their own" have hurt either to colonies or the home countries, even to the limited extent to which the US penetrated the markets of the remaining colonies? [snip] It should be noted that free trade has not only benefited the US: it's allowed many other nations, both from the old powers and from new ones, to rise and prosper. A huge improvement, it would seem to me.

I take it that the recession- which began in the US and cascaded throughout the economic systems embedded in US capital- is irrelevant? The current global recession is largely to do with American ineptitude in financial matters (deficits, recycling debt, etc.) coupled with the dollar’s position as global trading currency of choice and the manner in which “Western” economies are imbricated (admittedly with the establishment of the EU and the Eurozone things are now a little more complex).

by Dayuhan
An empire requires direct rule, [&c]. Take away a word's meaning and it means nothing at all. Respect the word.

I don’t quite know what to make of that. Words have many meanings and subtle nuances (see Grice on “implicature”). By your dictionary definition Jefferson’s statement that America is an “empire of liberty” means what, exactly? Or, for that matter, what does empire mean when Hamilton (Fed. Paper 22) says that “The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people”? Very odd. Empires can be territorially contiguous and non-contiguous as well as exhibit formal and informal hierarchical relations (for a start) that’s hardly in contradiction to the dictionary definition. Throwing simplistic dictionary definitions into the fray is hardly conducive to comprehending complex situations. Wittgenstein warned against the very logical positivist fallacy of ascribing a singular meaning to a word when in reality “usage defines meaning”. Cf the following explication from “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate”;

ideal-typical empires [...] differ from hegemonic and unipolar orders because they combine two features: rule through intermediaries and heterogeneous contracting between imperial cores and constituent political communities. These characteristics constitute ideal-typical empires as a form of political organization with particular network properties. Ideal-typical empires comprise a “rimless” hub-and-spoke system of authority, in which cores are connected to peripheries but peripheries themselves are disconnected—–or segmented—–from one another. When a particular set of relations takes on an imperial cast, a number of important changes occur in the basic dynamics of international politics:

First, dynamics of divide-and-rule supplant traditional balance-of-power politics. Imperial control works, in part, by preventing resistance in one periphery from spreading to other peripheries. Some of the most important challenges to imperial rule arise, therefore, when imperial policies, exogenous shocks, transnational movements, or other developments trigger uncoordinated or coordinated simultaneous resistance in multiple peripheries.(cont. below...