AHC: Best Case for "Co-Prosperity Sphere"

Haven't recent threads on these subjects indicated a possibility that the uncontrollable Japanese Army wasn't really what set the gears in motion for the war with the colonial powers, the Navy and the Southern strategy was?

If the mostly resource-self-sufficient Japanese Army keeps on land warring in northern Asia long enough, the Soviet Union and the collapse of European colonialism will set up a militarist Japan for leading a Co-Prosperity Sphere, and sattelites/puppets enforced through coups and proxy wars with sponsored guerrillas is kind of the way things were done in the OTL Cold War, so I can't see an anti-Soviet Japan getting curbstomped by the West for doing the same in Asia once the French and Dutch are getting thrown out of Indochina and the East Indies.

But that's even more than you have to do. I mean, FDR was planning to stop the embargo before the Pearl Harbor attack, right? And if Tsochar is right about the list of possible conditions, wouldn't Japan just leave the Tripartite pact and walk away with direct imperial control of the East Indies and Indochina?

Heck, what the Japanese Navy feared (the Army trying to take China in the North rather than seizing the Southern and more European-interested cities in the South leading to a war with Russia) happening would actually help Japan in the long run. A Japan that gets into a fight with Russia over China is a Japan that has created a situation where the US and Europe get to choose who they would rather have controlling Northern China, Japan or the Soviets. And I think we know how that choice would go if Japan manages to stay out of the Great War.


So there are two golden possibilities here:
- Embargo Off : Southern Advance strategy and ensuing embargo happens, but Pearl Harbor is delayed long enough for FDR to drop the emargo, leading to Japan leaving the Axis and staying out of WWII while enjoying de facto recognized holdings in Indonesia, Indochina, and Manchuria.
- Land War in Asia: No Southern Advance, no embargo. The trick here being avoiding Japan and the Soviets from fighting during the War in Europe and instead wait for it to be an early cold war conflict, where fighting with the Soviets for Manchuria and anything else the army was able to accomplish (inner mongolia, including Beijing?) would actually probably gain Japan more, in terms of becoming the anti-communist power in mainland Asia, with other non-communist post-colonial states naturally drifting into the Co-Prosperity Sphere under a Japanese nuclear umbrella and threat of Japanese sponsored coups and proxy-wars.
 

Cook

Banned
Haven't recent threads on these subjects indicated a possibility that the uncontrollable Japanese Army wasn't really what set the gears in motion for the war with the colonial powers, the Navy and the Southern strategy was?
Occupation of the Southern Resource Sphere was driven by the demands of the war in China, the IJA was not self-sufficient.
Taiwan, being the only puppet state that Japan treated amicably...
If we ignore the IJA practice of blooding troops in training; the troops being sent into the hinterland to exterminate a village.
 
If we ignore the IJA practice of blooding troops in training; the troops being sent into the hinterland to exterminate a village.

Modern-day Taiwan certainly seems willing to ignore it, seeing as how they're the only former part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere that still likes Japan IOTL.
 
@Laplaces Demon.

Fdr planning on dropping the embargo!?!?

What?

Afaik, the only way the us would have dropped embargoes would have been if japan pulled out of their conquests first.
 
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