In an interview on War and Foreign Policy

Your final book is John W Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.

This is a key study in the effects on the Japanese of the defeat of Japan by the United States in World War II. It shows the actual effects of a ruthless military victory magnanimously enforced by the victor over a defeated nation, and the beneficial consequences that followed for millions of people. The fundamental reason for this success is the shift in the ideas held by the Japanese people. In all the five books I have chosen the role of ideas is essential to the workings of foreign policy and war.

The key is education. Since 1890 Japan’s schools had been under the control of a military clique. They had indoctrinated children in worship of the emperor, sacrifice to the nation, and dying in battle. These ideas were drilled into their minds as moral ideals. Such indoctrination was ended under the Allied occupation. Knowledge came to be seen not as something revealed by a higher authority, but rather something which you have accepted by your own judgment. This was a difficult process for many. Dower reveals the anguish children and adults went through in thinking about the world in this new way. But the result was an end to mass sacrifice in war and the rejection of a military clique which had ruled Japan for several generations. Under American guidance the Japanese established a constitution and a society that institutionalised individual rights and peace. The new constitution explicitly upholds individual rights and repudiates war as a tool of foreign policy.

In your own book, Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History, you have examined some of these ideas. What is your attitude towards how wars are started?

My basic thesis is that wars begin when human beings choose to fight. Now the nature of that decision is very complicated: it has individual, social, and political levels. It is certainly the case that the average German in 1939 was trapped in a regime that he could not control. But it is also true that most of these Germans voted for Hitler, and could have risen up and overthrown him had they wanted to. As a society, however, they decided to follow him into war. This is the basic nature of a decision for war, taken on a social level.

Wars begin when two factors are in place. The first factor is the will to fight, whether in a country or a political group with political goals. For example, the Islamist groups that are waging terror wars today clearly have the will to attack. But they don’t have the second factor, which is the capacity to wage an attack. This would mean the possession of an army or effective weapons. Terrorists don’t have the capacity to drop a nuclear bomb on New York, which Bin Laden would have done if he had had one, so they crashed hijacked airliners into the Twin Towers instead. They expressed their will in this way because they had no greater capacity to attack. They are now creating such a capacity, in the nuclear program of Iran, which is also the product of their will to attack.

Consequently a war must be directed at the enemy’s will to fight. To fight a war effectively you must understand clearly what an enemy’s motivations are. In my book I take seven examples from history and demonstrate how victory over the will to fight in an enemy has led to long-term peace between former enemies. For example, Carthage waged decades of war against Rome over 60 years, until it was defeated by Rome in the Second Punic War. Given magnanimous terms of surrender, Carthage was willing to live in peace with Rome. This peace lasted for two generations, until the Romans broke it.

In an interview on Japan

You’ve started with Embracing Defeat: why is that first on your list of books on Japan?

I could have chosen many others, but personally I’m very interested in that period of the occupation by largely American troops just after World War II. It’s one of the most extraordinary episodes in modern history. It was the first time that Japan was occupied in its own history, and the world that was created at that time shaped post-war Japan. I think the author, John Dower, has caught that period – with all its complexity and its absurdity and its benevolence and its dark sides – better than anyone else, even, as far as I know, in Japanese. It’s not only a great work of history, but it’s beautifully written. I think history writing at its best should be, and can be, a form of literature and this would be a good example.

Occupations normally don’t work. Does he analyse why in this case it did?

That’s not really the way he approaches it. He analyses it really as a…confrontation isn’t quite the word, but a very peculiar meeting of two very different cultures and civilisations. Even though Japan had already been influenced by the United States as well as Europe for almost 100 years, in 1945 it was still an extraordinary meeting of cultures that was sometimes a confrontation and sometimes a happy mix.