Recent content by TRH

Circumventing the oil embargo with yet more aggression hardly sounds like something that would be ignored. Not least since the embargo started because of the Japanese occupation of French Indochina.

Leaner times and a stronger Labour probably also mean stronger and more radical Conservatives in response. I agree that reassessing Imperial relationships would be the immediate post-war priority, especially Ireland, but beyond that there's the potential for the political scene to get really ugly.

They'd never have major disagreements on foreign policy if they all agreed on such things. The primary difference between a hawk and a dove is how threatening you find your country's adversaries.

Considering novels depicting German invasions of England were so huge as to become their own literary genre over the 40+ years preceding WW1, I wouldn't credit the British public that much in terms of sober threat assessments.

That sounds like a contradiction.

In addition to what others have said, I'll point out that the ideas for a settlement that did emerge from the Japanese government during the war tended to involve retaining a lot of their pre-war empire and still being allowed to wage war in China. Even if the US dropped its requirement for...

At the same time, the debt trap happens when governments lack the ability to raise revenue internally for necessary improvements. Japan was more or less unique among non-Western countries in its ability to trade with the West on its own terms and develop without need for extensive loans or...

The distance alone would make resupply difficult. And that's before you take monsoon season into consideration.

I guess to be fair US news from Germany was effectively controlled by the Entente while the war was still on, so not sure what channels Zimmerman's confirmation was received by at the time.

And as the points of potential failure multiply, the pressure on everyone involved in this gigantic conspiracy to break ranks and try and stop the madness will only grow. Conspiracies are hard.

You need a ton of discipline to pull this off and keep it a secret. I doubt such a risky and high-level initiative goes forward without Cabinet approval, so just from the start you need all of them to, at a minimum, not squeal about this insanely risky proposal to attack neutral civilian targets...

Ismail I tried spreading Shia Islam everywhere he went in the early 1500s, and was extremely ruthless in doing so. It doesn't seem to have been particularly successful outside modern-day Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan, and Ismail's successors toned it back a lot. Shia's served to isolate Iran from...

Projecting Japan's 1930s globe-spanning ambitions back decades if not centuries is, like, half of the Japan-focused WI's around here.

I don't think the Americans would be so myopic as to not consider the next steps here. If Japan is willing to jump on the Spanish with no casus belli and seize key territories on the South China Sea, that raises a ton of questions about Japan's ultimate intentions towards China and its lucrative...

Name like that, it should’ve been.