I think it is painfully clear that the bourgeoisie are not driven forward or backward by an anticipated shortage of petroleum.
PEARL HARBOR THE FIRST ENERGY WAR
History Today, Dec, 2000, by Charles Maechling
Charles Maechling sees the US oil embargo against Japan as the direct origin of the decision to attack the United States in December 1941.
DECEMBER 7TH, 1941 -- in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt's stirring war message to Congress, `... a date that will live in infamy' -- marks the devastating Japanese naval air raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that sank or crippled the US battle fleet and plunged the United States into the Second World War.
In the summer of 1941 Japan had been at war on the mainland of Asia for four years. After amputating Manchuria from China in 1932, it had begun a full-sale and brutal invasion of China itself. A Japanese army of over a million now occupied the principal Chinese cities and large stretches of the interior. The Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek still, however, refused to sue for peace in spite of the loss of so much territory, and the drain of Japanese manpower and supplies continued unabated.
Just as today, Japan in 1941 was heavily dependent on outside sources for the minerals, petroleum and other raw materials needed to fuel its economy. The aim of Japan's programme of conquest, therefore, was to convert China into an economic vassal, the first step in carving out a continental economic system -- the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, also to embrace Korea, Indo-China, Malaya, and Indonesia. The plan was to insulate the region from world-wide depression by allowing raw materials to flow into Japan for conversion into manufactured goods for the limitless Chinese market, thereby ensuring freedom from Western economic domination.
Japan's limited energy resources was the plan's Achilles' heel. Despite minimal civilian petrol consumption, and a largely unmechanised army, Japan's oil consumption since 1931 had climbed steadily from a level -- unbelievably low by modern standards -- of about 21 million barrels a year to over 32 million barrels in 1941. (Japan's current annual consumption is about three billion barrels.) The most imperative defence requirement was to ensure ample reserve stocks for the powerful and growing Imperial Navy, and to this end Japan had accumulated a stockpile of around 54 million barrels with 29 million reserved for the Navy.
In 1941, Japan's dependence on outside sources for petroleum products was similar to what it is today. 90 per cent of the country's needs were made up by imports which in the late 1930s varied from a low figure of 30.6 million barrels in 1938 to 37.1 million in 1940, the excess going into the stockpile. But there was one enormous difference from today -- before the Second World War, the vast reserves of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East had yet to be developed, and 85 per cent of Japan's imports came from one monolithic supplier. Japan's private OPEC was the United States of America, then the world's leading exporter. And by 1941 relations with the United States had deteriorated to the verge of war.
It had not always been so. The United States had opened Japan up to the outside world in the nineteenth century. President Theodore Roosevelt had been responsible for securing a favourable settlement for Japan after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and Japan had been a de facto ally in the First World War. Despite resentment over restrictive US immigration laws, among the educated classes there was a considerable reservoir of good will for the United States
full: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1373/12_50/68147614/p1/article.jhtml
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