WI: America Doesn't Intervene With the Japanese Empire in the 1940s

Greenville

Banned
What if the United States left completely alone the affairs of Imperial Japan in the Pacific during the 1930s and 40s? This means no embargoes, no declared military domination of the Pacific, no condemnation of their actions, etc.
 

trurle

Banned
When the collapse of Japanese Empire will be delayed to the 196x-197x period after the initial Japanese victory in 2nd Sino-Japanese war around 1945 and the prolonged insurgency in China afterward. You can model after OTL French colonial empire collapse, but likely in more violent form. Also, more chances the Japan will be aligned (at least in some periods) with Warsaw Block countries rather than with NATO during cold war phase.

My prognosis is what Japan will retain Taiwan and Hainan islands to present in this timeline, but also Japan is going to be more impoverished compared to OTL.
 
victory in 2nd Sino-Japanese war around 1945 and the prolonged insurgency in China afterward.

Do you see Manchukuo being expanded more than OTL?

Also, more chances the Japan will be aligned (at least in some periods) with Warsaw Block countries rather than with NATO during cold war phase.

How do you see that happening? I wouldn't have thought Imperial Japan to be very keen on communism. Personally I see a more neutral stance on account of international isolation.

My prognosis is what Japan will retain Taiwan and Hainan islands to present in this timeline, but also Japan is going to be more impoverished compared to OTL.

Who's going to come on top of the Chinese civil war? Is any going to happen at all? Will one of the factions strike a deal with the Japanese? Or the Soviets? Any foreign intervention in that?
 
What if the United States left completely alone the affairs of Imperial Japan in the Pacific during the 1930s and 40s? This means no embargoes, no declared military domination of the Pacific, no condemnation of their actions, etc.

The US had been expecting war with Japan for some time, so aversion of war would involve a drastic shift in American foreign policy.

One possibility is to avert the US being involved in the League of Nations and turn it even more isolationist than before. Basically if WWI is nothing but a harsh lesson about international involvement, the US stays home and doesn't get involved with international bodies. So let's say WWI goes much worse, the Germans win, and it's pretty much how we view Vietnam IOTL. Wilson can't get the League up and going and the US pretty much tells the rest of the world to go to hell. If Italy goes fascist, America doesn't care. Japan is ravaging Asia? Not America's problem. Hitler is running over Europe? Let them sort it out.

Someone more isolationist than FDR wins in 1932 and does things differently - perhaps exacerbates racial tensions; I don't know.

One such possibility is one I came up with in another thread - a multipolar Cold War. Basically, the Nazis and Japanese Empire survive, as does a battered UK; the US turns more internationalist but focuses on the Americas, and China - or something of China - survives with the KMT in charge and industrializes. So much of the world is under the control of one of six empires.
 
Could Japan have done some treaty with the then-isolationist US to say, "We'll respect your Philippines & Hawaiian Islands, buy all the oil & ore you can sell us" ??

But, what could they trade in return ? IIRC, that was part of Japan's problem...

Um, wasn't that the Third Reich's problem, too ??
 

trurle

Banned
Do you see Manchukuo being expanded more than OTL?
Unlikely. Some new puppet states (Shanghai etc.) may be formed though.

How do you see that happening? I wouldn't have thought Imperial Japan to be very keen on communism. Personally I see a more neutral stance on account of international isolation.
Until the neutrality will be undermined by idiosyncrasies of Japanese political regime (lack of domestic political control made only worse by "successful" war) and the external pressures. I doubt the Japanese Empire can realistically stay neutral, not when the nuclear holocaust being threatened is 195x period. Warsaw Pact alignment is unrealistic given actively intervening USA, but this thread OP assume very passive USA stance up to 1949. I imagine Japan deploying some Soviet nuclear missiles in Pacific Mandate in exchange for political preferences (Cuban Crisis remake as Majuro Crisis)

Who's going to come on top of the Chinese civil war? Is any going to happen at all? Will one of the factions strike a deal with the Japanese? Or the Soviets? Any foreign intervention in that?
Japanese collaborators. IOTL, Kuomintang factions showed more collaboration with Japanese compared to communists, so i suspect at some point Chiang kai-Shek or man who replace him will ask for peace to have a honorable exit from the increasingly unpopular war. Without large external support, Chinese hardliners are not likely to survive in significant numbers until 1945.
 
Japan's more likely to kiss and make up with America than join the USSR. They hated Communism.

Conversely, given some of the other people America supported (Pinochet, the Argentine junta, Noriega, Mobotu) in the name of defeating the Red Menace, in a world without a Pacific War they probably wouldn't have much of a problem burying the hatchet with their fellow-capitalists in Japan.
 
US and Japan probably still end up at war, just a bit later than OTL

You see just because the US and co. are willing to sell to Japan, does not mean that Japan has the money to buy. Japan can't end the war in China for its own reasons, so it has to attack the European colonies to get the resources it needs once the foreign exchange runs out. Given that the US has not embargoed, or even condemned it, one could say, well why is Japan attacking the US, if the US is pretty much the most pro Japanese country in the world. Well, glad you asked, because the US is already allied with these countries and fighting a war with them. Huh?

All this talk about Japan and one has forgotten the Elephant in the Room, Germany. Three US warships have been attacked by German U-Boats by Oct. 1941, 1 sunk, plus the BB Texas was nearly torpedoed. US approved Lend-Lease in March, extended it to USSR in June. US occupied Iceland in June 1941, US had bombarded German land facilities in Sep. 1941 and issued the "Shoot on Sight" order that month. In short US entry into the European theater was coming soon, and I think by December '41, something like 75% of the US population was willing to go to war with Germany, and FDR was doing everything in his power to poke Hitler. In this case US war with Germany by Summer '42 is very probable and by the start of '43 almost certain

So by the time Japan runs out of cash to buy raw materials, the US is in the war and allied with UK and co., if US entry to the war doesn't choke off that flow anyways as the US needs them too and can pay more. So Japan still has to make the same calculation as OTL, and likely still gets the same results, except the correlation of forces is worse than OTL
 
US and Japan probably still end up at war, just a bit later than OTL

You see just because the US and co. are willing to sell to Japan, does not mean that Japan has the money to buy. Japan can't end the war in China for its own reasons, so it has to attack the European colonies to get the resources it needs once the foreign exchange runs out. Given that the US has not embargoed, or even condemned it, one could say, well why is Japan attacking the US, if the US is pretty much the most pro Japanese country in the world. Well, glad you asked, because the US is already allied with these countries and fighting a war with them. Huh?

All this talk about Japan and one has forgotten the Elephant in the Room, Germany. Three US warships have been attacked by German U-Boats by Oct. 1941, 1 sunk, plus the BB Texas was nearly torpedoed. US approved Lend-Lease in March, extended it to USSR in June. US occupied Iceland in June 1941, US had bombarded German land facilities in Sep. 1941 and issued the "Shoot on Sight" order that month. In short US entry into the European theater was coming soon, and I think by December '41, something like 75% of the US population was willing to go to war with Germany, and FDR was doing everything in his power to poke Hitler. In this case US war with Germany by Summer '42 is very probable and by the start of '43 almost certain

So by the time Japan runs out of cash to buy raw materials, the US is in the war and allied with UK and co., if US entry to the war doesn't choke off that flow anyways as the US needs them too and can pay more. So Japan still has to make the same calculation as OTL, and likely still gets the same results, except the correlation of forces is worse than OTL
Maybe this is too early for it to occur but is there any way Taft or some other isolationist can become president in the 40s?
 
But, what could they trade in return ? IIRC, that was part of Japan's problem...
I don't know why this constantly gets trotted out. Japan had a small but functional trade deficit of about $2.40 per person on average through the 1930s.

They supplied 80% of raw silk to the world, 10% of the world trade in tea.

Japan had a trade deficit but it was an affordable one.
 
But doesn't the 'isolationist' apply to Europe - no more involvement in European wars, Japan and the Pacific was a totally different matter.

I just thought of alternative scenario - maybe better a new thread.
 

Greenville

Banned
There probably is no war with the Japanese in the Pacific involving the United States. I can still see Japan seizing Hong Kong, Singapore, and other European colonies in 1941. They may leave the United States along if they don't perceive it as a threat or want to risk its entry into the war.

World War II begins for the United States in the Atlantic in 1942 after a German U-boat attacks and sinks an American destroyer off the coast of Greenland. America declares war on Germany as a result and the war in the Atlantic begins. By winter 1945, Germany surrenders and peace is secured in the Atlantic.

Japan manages to encapsulate coastal China and maintain its empire in the Pacific even European colonies. During the 1950s, the Soviet Union arms the Chinese national insurgents against Japanese occupation and others in Asia. Americans do the same as part of a proxy in China to eventually ware down and pressure Japan to leave. A violent guerrilla war lasts in China into the 1960s.

Eventually Japan seeks open trade relations with the United States and Soviet Union. Doing so changes the entire economic system of Japan causing less need for an empire. Eventually, autonomy is granted to their colonies and later even independence and self-governance. All that remains of the Japanese Empire is the commonwealth left for trading by the 1970s. Japan is the last traditional colonial empire left in the world to dissolve fully by the 1980s.
 
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