Yesterday I meant to acknowledge the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. December 7th of that year was a seminal date in World War 2 and in the 20th Century. Europe had been at war for two years already and the Nazis were still in the ascendant. In the East, Japan had been at war with China since 1937, having seized Manchuria in 1931.

Churchill desperately wanted the Americans in and doubtless Roosevelt wanted that too. What the Japanese wanted is less certain, for surely attacking an industrial power the size of the US was a road to ruin. Maybe they hoped to hunker down in the expanded Imperial Empire and negotiate a peace later on. Instead they got the full measure of American military power and in the end, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Today, we can trace back to this event the rise of modern Japan, the Cold War, the end of American isolationism and strangely enough, the triumph of the CCP in China. It strikes me now that the US is caught in an ambiguous and difficult bind, being a massive power, thrust since WW2 into a pivotal global role, but finding itself exhausted and confused by the complexities of the modern world.

It was not so on the morning of December 8, 1941.

Japanese aircraft over Pearl Harbor



The USS Arizona listing heavily.