Exploding the Idea That Trump’s Wars Can Handle China

It was astounding to learn from the TV show of the former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-FL) that an overall theme seems to be forming for President Donald Trump’s much more aggressive, second-term foreign policy in his private conversations with high-level Trump administration officials. Unfortunately, that theme is based on a very shaky grasp of reality.

Scarborough said the Trump administration rationale coming together is this: Decapitating the Venezuelan regime and attempting to topple the Iranian regime, both relying on stand-off force so far, combined with pressure on Russia, is an attempt to cut off China’s oil supply. 

One can only hope that this overall theme is an after-the-fact justification for an erratic president executing a shoot-from-the-hip foreign policy. And that would be the good news.

The bad news is that Trump doesn’t know American history—or perhaps knows only a MAGA version of “patriotic” U.S. history. Instruction in real history should tell the gang that trying to strangle the oil supplies of another great power can end up in involvement in a cataclysmic world war. 

Most Americans are taught that World War II began for the United States when the evil Imperial Japanese just started unloading bombs on a sleepy Pearl Harbor the first Sunday in December in 1941. The Japanese were certainly no saints, attempting to achieve using military power what the Western great powers, including the United States, had achieved in prior times using the same bloody means—empires in East Asia and the Pacific. But, in this quest, the Japanese had already become bogged down in a gigantic quagmire in China. They then made the mistake of trying to further expand into Indochina.  As a result, then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided to impose economic sanctions on the Japanese. Eventually, this included a cut-off of oil supplies to Japan by the United States, which was then the world’s dominant oil producer. Many in the United States government were aware at the time that this would probably precipitate a war with a desperate Japan.

But Japan did not want war with the American colossus. The American economy was significantly larger than that of Japan, Italy, and Nazi Germany combined. The Japanese government tried to arrange a summit between its then-civilian prime minister and FDR, but the American president would have none of it. The failure of negotiations caused the more moderate civilian government to fall and be replaced by the more hawkish government of Hideki Tojo. Even after this substitution, the Japanese emperor directed Tojo to make efforts to avoid war. These were also unsuccessful.

The Japanese, faced with the existential threat of strangulation of their military and society from an oil cutoff, predictably decided to move their military even farther south to capture the oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). To do so, their military supply line would need to run near the Philippines, a now-fortified U.S. colony grabbed during the Spanish–American War of 1898. Thus the Japanese (and everyone else) realized that a desperate move to capture oil in the Dutch East Indies would mean certain war with the American behemoth. Their only hope was to strike first to try to severely debilitate the American fleet in Hawaii (also annexed by the United States in the Spanish–American War). Some in the Japanese military believed that such a successful strike might make America sue for peace. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who had lived in the United States but led the attack on Pearl Harbor, correctly believed that was a vain hope. He was right.

History thus shows that trying to cut off oil supplies to China, a nuclear-armed power, by neutralizing its current petroleum suppliers—even if it could be done in a now truly global oil market—is a dangerous policy that needs to be quickly shelved. And with so many suppliers wanting to garner huge revenues from sales of a desirable product into the world market, China will just pay a little more to get oil under the table from other suppliers. That is, the world oil market will merely reorder to accommodate the even more lucrative Chinese demand. Any such misguided American foreign policy, based on a stark ignorance of the world oil market, is eventually doomed to fail, but could cause the Third World War in the meantime.

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