Bankrupting The Enemy: The Us Financial Siege Of Japan Before Pearl Harbor

摘要

With the multiple-award-winning War Plan Orange, Ed Miller showed himself to be a highly original researcher of the origins of the Pacific War. His new book, Bankrupting the Enemy: the US Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor, adds to that status. Admittedly, this is very different from War Plan Orange. No military history this time, but a detailed analysis of an almost neglected aspect of pre-World War II Japan-US relations: the fateful decision to invoke the 'obscure' Section 5(b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act (a relic from World War I), a paragraph that empowered then president Roosevelt to paralyse or 'freeze' the dollar holdings of foreign countries, whether enemy or not (apparently, the latter was included to be able to sanction Austria-Hungary, for example, which was not yet at war with the United States at the time). The logic was as follows: once deprived of US dollars, the key reserve currency par excellence, Japan would be brought 'to its senses, not its knees'. However 'inspired' Roosevelt's original intention may have been, ambitious bureaucrats decided otherwise.