Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Dwarkesh Patel" channel.

@Idris-ku9xm They did not attack the UK or Netherlands colonies before Pearl Harbor. They took over French Indochina which is what led to the oil embargo.
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The Japanese were up to a lot of things in the Pacific. That's one reason Allied planners didn't expect an attack on Pearl Harbor - they knew or strongly suspected the Japanese were planning attacks on Guam, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, and Hong Kong, and we didn't think they had the naval power to carry out all those attacks while also sending the cream of their navy east to Hawaii to attack the US Pacific Fleet. Part of that was underestimating the range and striking power of their land-based naval planes, we thought they'd need their carriers in the Philippines and Malaya campaigns because we didn't realize they had the capability to provide air support for those offensives from bases in Formosa (Taiwan) and Saigon.
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@RonLWilson Yes, it was one of the few times Stalin actually listened to what his intelligence services were telling him. The Soviet spy in Japan who discovered Japan's war plan and revealed it to the Soviet government was named Richard Sorge, and he is possibly the most important spy in modern history. He has also warned about Germany's planned attack on the USSR in June 1941 but on that occasion Stalin refused to heed the warning.
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Japanese society is VERY different now from what it was in the 1930s. I am not worried about a resurgence in Japanese militarism - I don't think they have any appetite for military adventures, they just feel the need for a deterrent against China and North Korea, and I don't blame them.
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It wasn't about Japan being able to bomb the Philippines, it was about American bombers based in the Philippines being able to cut Japan off from the resources it would acquire in SE Asia. The Philippines had little if any economic value to the US and the US had already started the process of transitioning to their independence. To the extent trade was a cause for US intervention it was trade with China which was a huge and rapidly emerging market in the 1930s.
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