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ID:l+B7CtWw No.23947145 View ViewReplyOriginalReport
Let’s go back to our wonderful America Firsters of the 1930s. The Great Depression hits, total mess. So what do we decide to do? Tariffs. This is the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. We’re basically saying, we’re going to wall ourselves off because we’ve got to keep jobs for Americans. But here’s the problem. This is half-court tennis. You’re not thinking, okay, what’s everybody else going to do? They’re going to retaliate exactly in kind. Now take Japan. They’d actually been pretty good citizens within the international order. They held high positions in the League of Nations which, by the way, we’d irresponsibly never even joined. Hawley-Smoot pulls the rug out from under the Japanese who were saying, no, no, we should cooperate with the international system. Japan is trade-dependent. So what are they supposed to do? Nobody will trade with them. Even their closest partners won’t. So they look at the world and say, okay, then we need an empire. We need something big enough to guarantee food, resources, the basics. And that’s the connection. 1930 is Hawley-Smoot. 1931 is the invasion of Manchuria. This is what happens when Americans have no grand strategy, when we don’t think deeply. Life is an interaction, right? I can say whatever I want to say, but then you get to make your own decisions. And if I don’t stop to think about what your decisions might be, I’m going to be in deep, dark trouble.