By Eamonn Fingleton

America’s shuttered factories and the false hope of post-industrialism. (This article first appeared in the November-December 2022 issue of The American Conservative.)

In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American nation responded  instantly and sure-footedly. In the  shipbuilding industry alone, the resulting surge in production was monumental. Thus, as recorded by the Naval History and Heritage Command, the U.S. Navy doubled its  fleet within a year and quadrupled it before the end of the war. It was a similar story in the merchant marine: by 1943 U.S. shipyards were turning out three merchant ships a day! They ended up building a total of nearly 3,300 before the end of the war.

America’s shuttered factories and the false hope of post-industrialism. (This article first appeared in the November -December 2022 issue The American Conservative.)

Given that shipbuilding was then one of the world’s most advanced industries, there could hardly have been a more impressive demonstration  of America’s global economic leadership. 

Fast forward to today, however, and we discover that America’s now much hollowed out manufacturing sector is having a hard enough time arming Ukraine (and can do so only with the help of copious imports of advanced electronic components and other crucial inputs from various trade partners, not least China). 

How come the U.S. manufacturing base has become so hollowed out? Let’s focus here on one key, if little understood, aspect of the story: the pernicious role played by so-called post-industrialism. The term comes from The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, a book by the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell. Writing in 1973, Bell predicted a growing  trend  for the United States to retreat from  manufacturing and to switch instead to new “post-industrial” services, of which computer software seemed to be this favorite. Jobs in post-industrial businesses would not only be cleaner and more advanced but better paid. And the great thing was that the United States seemed to enjoy some special – if not exactly spelled out – aptitude for post-industrial activities and would therefore benefit disproportionately. 

As we will see, this analysis was badly misguided but that did not stop it playing a decisive role in the decline of American manufacturing. In particular, it greatly weakened efforts in Washington and elsewhere to forge a national consensus in fighting foreign protectionism. If American manufacturers were not long for this world anyway, why, it was asked, should Washington expend vital  diplomatic capital on their behalf?  After all, nations like Japan, Germany, and Korea were evidently so intransigently committed to  mercantilism that Washington risked touching off a full-scale trade war if it pressed fully seriously for a fair deal for American manufacturers abroad. 

From this point onwards, American manufacturing was visibly on the skids. The longer America’s trade diplomats dithered, the larger and more formidable became the East Asian and European manufacturing challenge. For the challengers, size brought large economies of scale and  fast-expanding research and development departments. 

It also meant  the ability to fund ever more sophisticated lobbying initiatives abroad, not least in the United States.  Japanese and European corporate lobbyists fanned out across Washington and were soon pressing home their advantage. 

One tactic was to blame the victim. They alleged  that American manufacturers were underinvesting. Few observers seemed to notice that this  got the causality exactly reversed. The fact was that because world markets were heavily rigged against them, American manufacturers suffered chronically poor returns on investment. They therefore lacked the large retained profits needed to invest in the most efficient new manufacturing technologies.  

All this is the more surprising for the fact that anyone who glanced at Bell’s book found it shed remarkably little light on the issues.  About the only thing it contributed was a little news:  manufacturing’s share of total U.S. economic output was declining, he reported, and the share accounted for by  services was rising. He was right on both counts but this hardly meant manufacturing was finished as a principal source of First World wealth and economic leadership. The trends Bell noticed were relative (itals) ones.  Looking at the world as a whole, there was no  evidence that manufacturing was losing its position as a principal driver of prosperity.

Nor did Bell offer any fundamental reason for believing that, going forward, post-industrial services would prove more effective in increasing wealth than traditional manufacturing. In the event as we can now see clearly in retrospect, post-industrialism has proven no  panacea. Of course, some post-industrial businesses  have proved  spectacularly successful – companies like Google and Amazon come to mind. But even with Silicon Valley’s massive growth of the last half century, post-industrialism has fallen far short of creating enough new American  jobs to make up for the loss of manufacturing. 

This is where we get right to the point: jobs are one of three vital economic criteria on which  manufacturing’s contribution is a strongly positive one.  The other two are  wages and exports.

The jobs point hardly needs elaboration: factory work generally  creates  plenty of productive jobs for ordinary workers.  By contrast, jobs in many of the most successful post-industrial businesses are reserved disproportionately for workers of above-average ability. 

Of course, there are some exceptions. Thus Uber and DoorDash are examples of so-called  “gig economy” employers who create plenty of work for workers of  average ability. The problem is that such work compares quite unfavorably with the sort of jobs manufacturing used to create in better times. For the most part, gig economy work  pays little more than minimum wages and falls down also in terms of job  security and benefits.  

Contrast that with how things were in manufacturing  in the 1950s through the early 1970s, when well-paid, secure, pensionable jobs were becoming the norm even for assembly-line workers. ck

Why do  some employers pay more  than others? This question is central yet Bell never attempted to address it. In reality many factors go into determining wage levels but a crucial one is whether a business is capital-intensive or labor-intensive.  Generally, if other things are equal, capital-intensive employers pay better – and in many cases a lot better. 

Bell never explicitly considered the distinction. He seems, however, to have assumed – without really realizing he was making an assumption – that factory work in the United States was either already generally labor-intensive or was headed that way. Thus American factory jobs were destined soon to fall victim to competition from cheap-labor foreign locations. 

But  the truth was then, and still  is today, that factory work is a mixed bag. Yes, some factory work is labor-intensive and therefore low-wage nations enjoy a clear competitive advantage. But leading-edge manufacturers are generally avowedly capital-intensive. By definition this means that wage costs account for a relatively small proportion of their total costs. The term “capital-intensive” is necessarily jargonistic but is easy to understand if you think of each worker having his or her output powerfully boosted by an array of advanced production machinery. 

In practice locating factories in high-wage nations incurs little or no net cost disadvantage. The point is that the disadvantage of higher wage costs is  more than offset by the several advantages of operating in a First World location. Just the most obvious of these is that it is generally easier to get key technical staff to work in, say, Texas than in Fujian. 

Another consideration is trade secrets. These are often critically important in capital-intensive businesses and the battle to thwart industrial espionage is constant. In general such secrets are probably easier to protect if they are kept at home.

Seen from the point of view of the overall national interest, another key consideration is trade. Manufactured products tend to be fundamentally more exportable.  This reflects in part the fact that they tend to be less culture-specific. A car made in Japan or Germany, for instance, can be sold around the world with remarkably few adjustments for different cultures and different markets.

So-called producers’ goods are particularly free from cultural ties. Such goods are rarely mentioned in the press yet they are vital to the world economy. The category includes  super-miniaturized electronic components, highly refined materials, and ultra-precise machine tools. Often for any given item only  one or two manufacturers exist worldwide. And the processes involved in making such goods are generally highly capital-intensive and thus they provide plenty of headroom to pay above-average wages. 

Take, for instance, precision lenses. Known to the consumer mainly for their use in cameras, lenses are actually mission-critical components in countless medical, dental, scientific, and industrial applications. They are vital too in countless defense applications. The  United States long ago dropped out of contention in lenses and these days depends mainly on Japan and Germany for state-of-the-art supplies. 

As a general rule, manufacturers who dominate a significant sector in producers’ goods can expect not only to enjoy strong export sales  but strong export pricing. By contrast post-industrial businesses are generally poor exporters – at best they sell little abroad and their pricing power is generally weak. This contrasts with the remarkable strength American manufacturers enjoyed around the world in the days of American leadership. 

Many post-industrial companies  don’t export at all and in the case of even the strongest and most advanced of them, the ability to expand abroad  is generally constrained by linguistic and cultural impediments. Such difficulties may in some cases  be surmounted but at a cost and usually a considerable one. Thus Google, for instance,  has had to build a serious bricks-and-mortar presence  in countless foreign markets. So elaborate are Google’s overseas operations  that Google buildings are local landmarks in places as far afield as Tokyo, Wroclaw, Amsterdam, TelAviv, Haifa, Kuala Lumpur, London, and Dublin. 

Even an internet retailer as tech-savvy as Amazon performs quite disappointingly in key overseas markets such as China and Japan. Indeed at last count, Amazon’s sales in the United States and Canada accounted for nearly two-thirds of its total. 

The take-home message here is that the shift to post-industrialism has greatly compounded America’s  huge pre-existing trade problems.  

The result is that the United States has consistently been running huge trade deficits since the 1970s. In recent years these have settled down to average 3  to 4 ck percent of gross domestic product –  a  performance that implies that the U.S. dollar is greatly overvalued against the currencies of several big exporting nations, most notably China, Japan, and Germany. 

As a matter of  basic arithmetic, trade deficits have to be financed.  This means that successive generations at the U.S. Treasury have had to have had huge resort to foreign creditors, most notably the banks and institutional investors  of Japan, China, and South Korea.  These institutions have evidently decided for now to continue to play their allotted role in a drama directed by the  U.S. Treasury. For a few years longer they will continue to finance American ocer-consumption. Little understood in Washington, however, the Asians probably don’t plan to be taken for granted forever. America’s foreign borrowing will have to be repaid and in the process Americans will have to accept  more and more back-seating from foreign creditors. 

How do we sum up on Bell? He was not only an exceptionally poor thinker but a poor writer, and the book he produced was almost unreadably bad. He was a sociologist innocent of even the most basic and illuminating economic concepts. He rarely cited any facts – at least not relevant facts –  but larded his text instead with references to people like Leonardo Da Vinci and Einstein. The only purpose of  such  asides seems to have been to advertise his general knowledge. 

All this is the more surprising for the fact that the field does not lack for serious thinkers and serious books. One of the earliest and most persuasive books was Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy, by Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman. This was first published in good time to catch the policy debate in the mid-1980s.  Another  author who was also commendably early (mid-1990s) and prescient in his analysis was Louis Uchitelle, author of The Downsizing of America. Others who have done serious work in and around the field have included  Pat Choate, James Fallows, Alan Tonelson, Peter Navarro, and Clyde Prestowicz.

There is a  mystery here: how come a book as bad as Bell’s  – it might most charitably be described as  a historical curiosity – could have achieved such seeming influence? 

The answer seems to be that his message suited various powerful if shadowy vested interests. Had he not already existed, the trade lobby would have  had to to invent him. 

Eamonn Fingleton is the  author of In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

By Eamonn Fingleton

(This article appears in the January-February 2022 issue of The American Conservative. To read it in pdf form,  please click here.)

In April 1998 Sony Corporation chairman Norio Ohga made world headlines with this comment: “The Japanese economy is on the verge of collapsing.”

In reality nothing in Sony’s own experience supported such an assessment. On the contrary, Sony’s business actually boomed right through the 1990s. More generally Japanese industrial corporations continued strongly to gain share from American rivals. Yet they all talked as if Japan was a hopeless basket case.

Even the president of Toyota Motor Hiroshi Okuda joined in, suggesting Japan could cause a “world-wide financial crash.” This despite the fact that Toyota’s sales soared fully 95 percent in the 1990s. Between 1989 and 2019, moreover, Toyota went from little more than one-quarter of General Motors’s revenues to nearly twice as large.

As for Sony’s Ohga, his talk was even more puzzling. In the quarterly accounting  period of his remark, Sony’s sales  in the Japanese market actually increased by 14.7 per cent. The wider picture  was also  impressive: measured against 1989 (the last year of Japan’s 1980s boom), Sony’s profits in 1998 were up fully 131 percent! As if that wasn’t enough, the 1990s counted as the decade when  Sony finally buried such once formidable American rivals as Motorola, RCA, and Zenith.

This is cognitive dissonance on a vast scale. So what was really going on? In truth Japan’s alleged economic disaster of the 1990s was a fake funk:  Japanese leaders just pretended their economy was collapsing. There was method in their madness: they desperately wanted  Washington to cut Tokyo some slack in trade negotiations. This was at a time when Americans had never been more incandescent with rage about Japan’s closed markets. The gambit worked in spades. Not only did Washington back off trying to open Japan but it has never subsequently tried any further market opening efforts.

I have explained more about Japan’s 1990s fake funk in a New York Times commentary. (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-true-story-of-japans-economic-success.html)

For now let’s note that the issue of Japan’s true performance is of first order historic importance because of its implications for (1) the rise of China, and (2) for the coming triumph of authoritarianism around the world. Both China and Japan  operate essentially the same authoritarian — and almost universally misunderstood and underestimated — economic model. Let’s call this the Confucian model.

China runs about twenty years behind Japan, as is obvious in, for instance, the global car industry. This means it has a lot of technologically easy catchup growth ahead of it. Combine this with the fact that China boasts four times America’s population (and eleven times Japan’s) and it is hard to exaggerate how dominant Beijing will be by 2050.

Invented in the desperately poor circumstances of early-1950s Japan (and thus a  memorable  instance of necessity playing mother to invention!), the Confucian model has long been powerfully shaping economic outcomes in South Korea and Taiwan as well as, of course, in China and Japan.

The model’s key function is to force-feed  the  growth process. Admittedly in the case of Japan,  growth lately has been lower than it was in the 1980s. But this reflects factors external to the model: in particular, as economists like Paul Krugman and William Cline have pointed out, Japan’s growth has been greatly curtailed by a uniquely jolting demographic switchback (the echo of a major effort begun in 1948 to reduce the population).

Of course, those in the West who cling to the belief  that the model failed Japan see little reason to worry about a rising China.

On the other hand, for those who realize that the model greatly alleviated Japan’s uniquely difficult demographic problems, it is clear that the Confucian model presents a devastating challenge to the United States. Japan never lost its mojo in recent decades and the prospect is that China will not either.

We will discuss some of the Confucian model’s key features  in a moment. First though let’s note that  this model is fundamentally incompatible with America’s hopes for a global rollout of free markets. There are two immediate problems:

1. The Confucian model is not only protectionist but is unalterably so. Other aspects of the model cannot work without a protected home market.

2. The Confucian model features a complex lattice-work of corporate structures that clearly conflicts with American free-market capitalism. Not the least of these structures is cartels, which are, of course, strictly forbidden under U.S. law. Another problem is Japan’s keiretsus and other similar corporate groupings (these latter are known  as chaebols in South  Korea,  qiye jituans in China, and  quangxi jituans in Taiwan).  As we will see,  such structures are undoubtedly on balance helpful in improving East Asian productivity.

Let’s be clear: the Confucian system makes considerable use of markets and this, of course, encourages hopes in Washington for a general  trend towards greater freedom in East Asia. In reality, however, top officials throughout the region claim the right to overrule market forces almost at will. Moreover they often use cartels and keiretsus as power vectors that help them reach deeply into the system’s  internal workings. “Undesirable elements” quickly discover there is nowhere to hide.

A key difference is in how corporate executives see their responsibilities. Whereas in the United States they focus on profits almost to the exclusion of everything else, in East Asia worker productivity gets priority.

To understand the Confucian system the best starting point is its savings strategy. If a nation’s savers save more, corporations can invest more. If corporations invest more, workers can produce more. Equipped with the most advanced production machinery (robots, for instance, in the car industry), nations can  quickly leap to the forefront   in productivity. Economic growth is thereby stimulated.

Of course, savers need a return and here is where protectionism is so important. Corporations earn super-high profits in the home market and these are then applied to looking after the various sources of  capital. Meanwhile producers can aggressively cut prices in export markets.

For an economy to keep growing, savers must keep  saving. This is where the Confucian model really comes into its own again. The model’s most important — and most counterintuitive — feature is its savings process.

With few exceptions, American observers assume that culture is sufficient to explain the region’s super-high savings rates. Supposedly Confucianism instills in everyone a powerful tendency to frugality.

This, however, does not fit the facts. In former times when East Asian nations seemed  more Confucian than they are today, they were often notably weak savers. Japan’s savings rate remained low well into the 1950s. Singapore,South Korea, and China followed a similar pattern, with low savings rates as late as the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s respectively.

In reality it is only when East Asian nations begin to adopt other aspects of the Confucian model — in particular the model’s aggressively mercantilist trade policy — that their savings rates take off.

Behind all this is a policy virtually unheard of in latter day America: suppressed consumption. By discouraging consumption, top officials ensure that an economy’s savings rate is strongly stimulated.

To anyone tutored in modern American economic thought, the idea of suppressing consumption may seem to be bordering on insanity. But that is not how things look  in modern East Asia. Nor is it how  things looked to U.S. economic planners in former times. Soon  after Pearl Harbor, the United States began  tightly suppressing  consumption. The program started with rubber tires and in April 1942, rationing was extended to cars, sugar, typewriters, and gasoline. By the end of the war, the program also included coffee, shoes, stoves, meats, processed foods, and bicycles.  Lo and behold, the result was a preternatural increase in the savings rate: according to the economist Laura Nicolae, U.S. households’ excess savings during the war totaled nearly 40 percent of national income.

In modern East Asia, the effort to suppress consumption is less direct but it is equally effective. For a start East Asian governments restrict the import of key consumer products. Another important strategy is to minimize consumer credit. Mortgage finance  is largely or totally unavailable in many parts of the region. Credit cards are also hard to come by. This  point is often missed  because American correspondents tend to  conflate debit cards with credit cards. According to Fitch Ratings recently, fewer than 30 percent of Chinese adults had at least one credit card, compared to 79 percent in the United States.

Meanwhile in many East Asian nations, zoning is so tight that housing is rendered stunningly expensive. Restricted living space means consumers consume less electricity and gas. They also buy fewer appliances and items of furniture.

According to the Australia-based statistical website Finder.com, of the ten nations with the world’s most  expensive city-center housing  recently, six were in East Asia. In descending order they were Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China.

One further point needs to be noted: much of East Asia’s saving takes the form of corporate profits. Certain special corporations make huge profits through  oligopolistic control of, for instance, urban land.

Now let’s consider the Confucian model’s approach to employment. This is perhaps the area where the East Asian model diverges most obviously from American capitalism.

As a matter of employer etiquette, major East Asian employers do not hire from direct competitors. Moreover they rarely resort to lay-offs, even in the worst recessions. This creates by default a rather settled system of long-term employment.

Orthodox American economists regard East Asia’s no-layoffs policy as “inefficient.” But the region’s passionately patriotic government officials see things differently: any calculation of the benefits to society from American-style hire-and-fire should, they believe, be netted for the cost to the public purse of unemployment benefit.

The psychological advantages that accrue to employers from a no-layoffs policy are a lot more beneficial than is understood in modern America. For a start East Asian workforces feature a far greater degree of long-term accountability. They are also impressively long on teamwork. Because the  East Asian employment system expects employees to commit for the long term, there are rarely second chances for employees who fall out with their first employer. That means that workers are considerably more cooperative in taking on tough assignments.  Certainly East Asian employers enjoy the observed advantage that at all times they have at their disposal  battalions of hard-working employees willing to be sent anywhere and do anything to further their employer’s agenda.

Another advantage of the East Asian system is that it provides employers with a much greater incentive to invest in worker skills. By contrast American employers have to worry that any workers they train may be quickly  hired away by rival employers.

In recessions, East Asian employers beat the bushes to find other work for their workers. They will even go to the extent of inventing “busywork” but generally things don’t get that bad and even in a recession East Asian corporations rarely run out of useful work to do.

Moreover the degree to which  East Asian corporations can cut export prices and still come out ahead is greater than Americans typically understand. A key point  is that  there is a big  difference in the way that labor costs necessarily must be accounted for.  In the terminology of the accounting profession, wage costs count  as a fixed cost for East Asian employers, whereas they are a variable one for American employers. This has crucial implications because so long as variable costs are covered, East Asian corporations can keep discounting their prices. Hence in large part the reason why in a recession  East Asian corporations can quote almost preternaturally low prices.

Faced with the never-undersold nature  of East Asian competition, American employers often enter a process of terminal shrinkage. They slash jobs in a recession but rarely fully restore these in a recovery. Instead they may resort to outsourcing, which they consider to  make  particular sense in the early, tentative stages of a recovery. A  devastating ratchet effect is therefore at work in which over the long haul the Americans keep losing market share.

All that said, even East Asian corporations hardly emerge unscathed from a global recession. In withstanding the strains, however, they have an important cushion in undervalued home currencies. Put another way, the U.S. dollar has long been  massively overvalued. Just how overvalued is suggested when you consider America’s forty-year record of huge trade deficits. How low would the dollar have to go before we might see a real revival in industrial investment in the United States?  A reasonable guess is that even a devaluation of as much as 75 or 80 percent would not have an appreciable effect. Yet a revaluation on that scale would  imply that total U.S. gross domestic product  would at a stroke be cut to less  than China’s and even Japan’s. No U.S. Presidential administration is likely to contemplate such a haircut. Meanwhile the big exporting nations — including Germany, as well as China and Japan — will probably for several years to come continue to prop up  the dollar as a quid pro quo for continued  access to the American market. Remember that these nations’ top priority is not financial but rather industrial and they therefore aspire to  continue to hone their production skills. The super-long production runs provided by an open American market are an important help in this regard.

Let’s briefly consider some other features of the Confucian system.  Perhaps the most troublesome from an American point of view is cartels.

The one thing every American  first-year economics student seems to know is that cartels are bad! They not only cheat  consumers but featherbed inefficient industrial processes. Or so orthodox American thinkers vociferously proclaim.

In East Asia the view is  different. East Asian cartels are quasi-regulated institutions answerable at all times to the national interest. Yes, members of such cartels fix prices but, no, they don’t necessarily shut down all forms of competition. Rather cartel members are generally encouraged  to  compete on quality and service.  As for unrestrained free-market pricing, this is seen as wasteful because this diverts executive attention away from the weightier matter of delivering ever higher quality at ever lower production cost. The problem of gimmicky pricing incidentally can be particularly acute in the most capital-intensive industries, which are precisely the industries with the best prospects of creating well-paid rank-and-file jobs going forward.

Another advantage of cartels is in standard setting. In former times, industrial standards typically originated in the United States. Not anymore. Most standards these days emerge from East Asia. This is important because those who set standards tend to favor their own interests.

Then there is perhaps  the most important advantage of  East Asian-style cartels: they reduce the cost of  research and development. This is because they divide up  research projects among cartel members and thus minimize duplication. This feature alone may make all the difference, as it is not unusual for leading  manufacturing corporations elsewhere in the world to spend as much as 5 percent of sales on research and development.  East Asian cartels get far more innovation for their money and this benefit is passed on to each member.

Much, much could be said but already it should be clear that the United States desperately needs to take a closer look at the Confucian model. The conclusion is epochal: a system that rivals Soviet communism in its grim suppression of individualism is now powerfully outperforming American free-market capitalism. The outperformance  is most obvious in international trade but on closer  examination the Confucian system’s superior wealth-creating capabilities are evident almost right across the board.

In short we are witnessing a fundamental revolution in the human condition. The world is transitioning from an era when free societies did well precisely because they were free, to a new era in which authoritarian societies are doing well precisely because they are authoritarian.

In one sentence, authoritarianism is set to inherit the earth.

Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

By Eamonn Fingleton

It is a question that comes up every year: was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima justified? This year — the 75th anniversary of the attack — the question seems more pertinent than ever.

The bombing, which took place on August 6th 1945, killed perhaps 80,000 people. A second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later may have claimed as many as 50,000 more lives.

The decision to use nuclear weapons ultimately lay with then U.S. President Harry Truman, and to the end of his days he was to insist not only that his decision was morally justified but that it saved more lives than it sacrificed. His version quickly became conventional wisdom not only in the United States but to a lesser extent in much of the rest of the English-speaking world. In some retellings moreover the decision to go nuclear has even been cast as a net benefit to the Japanese people. The idea is that by hastening the collapse of the Japanese military government, it obviated the need for a massive American military invasion of the home islands of Japan, an initiative that undoubtedly would have proved profusely bloody.

As a journalist and author who lived 27 years in Tokyo, I have long been aware that this “Truman version” conceals as much as it reveals. All the evidence is not only that Truman’s resort to nuclear weapons was morally highly questionable but that it greatly compounded America’s subsequent problems in achieving a sincere meeting of minds with the Japanese people in the post-1945 era.

A fundamental weakness of the Truman version is that it posits a false choice. Supposedly Truman had only two options: either he reached for the bomb or he ordered a massive conventional military invasion of Japan. This latter was already being planned by U.S. generals in the summer of 1945 and had tentatively been scheduled to begin in November of that year.

But were these the only choices available? Hardly. An obvious third choice would have been simply to have imposed a naval embargo on Japan. All the evidence is that, by cutting Japan off from vital sources of food and other necessities, an embargo would have proved almost as quick and efficient as atomic bombs in breaking the Japanese militarists’ will (and that’s not even counting the devastating effect that the  Soviet Union’s entry into the war on August 8 1945 was to have — more about that later).

The fact is that Japan was uniquely vulnerable. Already it was one of the world’s most densely populated nations, and in those days, before the rise of factory farming, densely populated nations had no alternative but to rely on imports for the vast bulk of their food. As an island nation moreover, Japan was remarkably dependent on ships to transport such imports. Yet by the summer of 1945 about four fifths of its military and civilian shipping had already been sunk. And had the Allies devoted enough of their submarines to embargoing Japan, they could have sunk much of what remained of Japanese shipping within weeks.

Proponents of the Truman version suggest that a naval blockade would have been almost as cruel as the atomic bomb. Perhaps — but this follows only if you assume that Japanese leaders would have persisted with the war indefinitely. Responsibility for any deaths from starvation in the meantime moreover would have lain in the first instance with Tokyo and not with Washington. After all, at any point, the starvation could have been quickly alleviated if Japan surrendered, something that since Germany had surrendered unconditionally in May 1945, all senior Japanese leaders knew would be the inevitable outcome in any case. To add to the pressure, Washington could have arranged a special demonstration of a nuclear explosion to be witnessed from a safe distance by the militarists’ representatives. Such a demonstration would have been almost as powerful as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in concentrating minds among Japanese leaders (particularly if there was an implied threat that Tokyo would be next).

Proponents of the Truman version often insist that, without the unique shock of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the Japanese would indeed have persisted with the war indefinitely. But this assumes a degree of irrational intransigence that anyone who knows the Japanese knows is a figment of Western imaginations. The truth is that while the Japanese often appear remarkably irrational, this is almost invariably no more than a facade or a negotiating tactic. If you look underneath the surface, the Japanese are generally found to be behaving perfectly rationally. It is worth pointing out that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the West first came into extensive contact with the Japanese, the pattern for the Japanese to speak irrationally (in a remarkable cultural phenomenon known in Japanese as tatemae) was widely commented upon. It was wittily satirized, for instance, in W.S. Gilbert’s portrayal of Poobah in The Mikado. In subsequent times, however, under American influence, the West largely lost sight of the tatemae phenomenon, and has tended more and more earnestly to take the Japanese at face value and overlook the Japanese capacity for “nonsense speak”.

But surely, you might suggest, the fighting pattern of Japanese troops in World War II provides conclusive evidence of a culture of extreme irrationality. After all, with remarkably few exceptions, Japanese fighting men never allowed themselves to be taken alive. At first sight this certainly suggests a degree of fanaticism almost unique in the history of war. But it hardly seems so irrational if viewed in context. The truth is that Japan’s fighting men were indoctrinated to believe that if they were taken alive they would be subjected to torture even more extreme than that which they routinely saw visited on countless American troops who had had the misfortune to be taken alive. In other words in opting to kill themselves, Japanese fighters believed they were choosing the lesser of two evils. And in the meantime because they could be expected to fight to the death, they represented a uniquely dangerous threat.

Some commentators have argued that had not Truman resorted to atomic weapons,  hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners of war would have been massacred by the Japanese in the final weeks of the war. This argument was presented most notably in a book in 1970 by Laurens van der Post, a South African-born British Army officer who had himself been held prisoner by the Japanese for more than three years. There are several weaknesses in  van der Post’s argument, not least that it assumes that the Japanese would have persisted for many more months with a war that, even before the Hiroshima bombing, the Tokyo leadership knew was doomed. It overlooks in particular the fact that for many weeks before August 6, Russia was clearly planning to attack Japan (it had previously been neutral in East Asia). In the end it declared war on Japan on August 8.  It is hard to exaggerate how profoundly this event alone transformed the situation. The truth is that as the East Asian war entered its final stages after Germany’s surrender, nothing terrified Japan more than the threat of a Soviet invasion. The reality is that irrespective of whether Truman dropped the bomb or not, the Japanese would have chosen prompt surrender to the Americans as by far the more acceptable of two evils.  To have continued to resist would have resulted in much of their country coming under Soviet domination.

One aspect of the conventional account that cries out for particular attention is the way Truman chose to present his decision. In a radio address after the first bomb, he suggested that Hiroshima had been chosen because it was a military base. He commented: “We wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” The truth is that though there was indeed a military base in the Hiroshima area, it was NOT the target. Rather the target was the city’s residential and commercial districts. Evidence recently cited by the political scientists Katherine E. McKinney, Scott D. Sagan and Allen S. Weiner suggests that fewer than 10 percent of those who died on August 6th 1945 were military personnel. Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, McKinney and her co-authors added that the Americans “deliberately chose to maximize the number of civilians who succumbed in the attack.”

This seems to settle the matter. It is past time to call a spade a spade. Truman’s decision was driven primarily by a desire for vengeance. The circumstances of August 1945 were certainly extenuating but the desire for vengeance never brings out the best in the human spirit.

Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).