I would like to share with you a stunning essay from RealClearHistory.[1] By “stunning” I don’t mean it is absolutely correct but it is eye-opening. David Pyne lists the wars the U.S. shouldn’t have entered or supported—but did. These wrong wars start with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and end with today’s Ukraine-Russia war. As for the wars we should have fought, he bluntly explains how they were badly managed.
Pyne writes:
“A study of the outcome of major wars America has fought over the past 125 years strongly suggests that U.S. military involvement in these conflicts has resulted in tragic and unforeseen consequences leading to tens of millions of unnecessary deaths while also serving to create new, and, in some cases, much more powerful enemies, making the U.S. much less safe and secure in the process.”
This man is not a left-winger writing for The Nation or Mother Jones. He is deputy director of a nonprofit organization, EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security. EMP refers to electromagnetic pulses, which can be used to disrupt the electrical grid and possibly other critical infrastructure. The organization was initially authorized by Congress as an advisory board and works with conservative members of Congress.
When I began looking into the defeat of the Japanese in World War II, I was surprised to find so much written about the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet Union was a major factor in the war against the Germans—it lost more soldiers than any other country in the war.
But how important was the USSR in the Pacific? Quite important, as it turns out. The Soviet Union, the atomic bomb, and the potential invasion of Japan all were tightly entwined in the decisions made in the last days of the war.
This is my third and final post on the American decision to use the atom bomb. I’m not trying to judge the decision. As an educated layperson looking freshly at history, I just want to understand it.
In my first post I pointed out that President Truman knew nothing about the bomb until Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. The bomb was used less than four months later. Thus, it had enormous momentum and would have been difficult to stop. (Given how ill Roosevelt was, it is strange that he did not inform his vice president of such a major event; one historian calls this failure “disgraceful.”)[1]
In the second post I discussed whether the U. S. demand for unconditional surrender kept the Japanese from surrendering. This remains a genuine question. Had the Americans assured that the emperor could remain in his position, the “peace party” in Japan would have been even more eager to end the war.
However, the enormous resistance (and prominence) of the “war party”—even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and the emperor had prepared a surrender statement—weakens this otherwise persuasive claim. A violent coup to stop the emperor’s surrender statement from being broadcast to the public was almost successful; a general was killed in cold blood and another committed ritual suicide. [2]
Historians tend to write about the causes of events, not about whether those events should have happened. They don’t usually ask if the American colonists should have declared war against Britain or whether Robert E. Lee should have decided to lead the Confederate army.
But some subjects are so momentous that historians have difficulty avoiding moral questions. That is the case with Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, a decision that continues to be controversial.
According to Tsoyushi Hasegawa, there has long been a debate between orthodox historians and revisionists. The former argue that it was necessary in order to avoid the loss of thousands of lives in an invasion of Japan. The latter say it should not have been used because Japan was essentially defeated already and the actual purpose of the bombings was to send a message to Stalin.[1]
In this and two following posts I want to look afresh at some of the elements that fed into Truman’s decision. I do not attempt to decide whether Truman should have authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although I may help some readers think about it. Continue reading “A President’s Troubling Surprise: The Manhattan Project”
“The West likes him. The people of Russia, not so much.” That has been a theme in tributes to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former head of the Soviet Union, who died yesterday, August 30.
You may know more about Gorbachev than I did a few years ago when I wrote a paper about him for a class about modern European history. But perhaps sharing some of the history I learned will reveal why the West is grateful to him, even if the people of Russia are not.
Gorbachev never intended to break up the Soviet Union. He simply didn’t know that perestroika (restructuring the USSR’s economy) and glasnost (openness of speech) would result in cataclysmic change. Continue reading “Was Mikhail Gorbachev a Hero? Yes.”
If you are like me, you think of peace as both the ideal and the natural state of humanity. Wars interrupt this peace. They are aberrations that usually occur because “bad” people—aggressive government leaders—try to expand their territory, and other governments respond with force.
Jeremy Black, an emeritus history professor at the University of Exeter, has written a book that undermines this view, at the same time challenging many claims of military historians.
Let me caution that I do not urge most of my readers to go out and buy his book, A Short History of War. Black summarizes as many conflicts as he can fit into a 258-page book, and for those of us unfamiliar with military history it is what journalists call “listy.” What makes the book valuable is that Black helps us think broadly and objectively about war and violence (closely related but not synonymous terms). Yet because most of the book consists of examples, gleaning his message takes some efforts of interpretation.
