Living Forward, Judging Backward

Studying history is difficult not because the facts are hidden, but because our minds distort time, overvalue hindsight, and isolate events from their global context. We often judge political actors too quickly because we know the outcome of the story. You cannot study events properly if you use the wrong data and use information that people did not have at the time. For example, no one should use 1989 GDP data when trying to predict something that occurred in 1995. It’s important to remember that people did not know as much as we do now.

For example, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Imperial Japan developed two military expansion plans to get natural resources, as Japan had a natural resource scarcity. One option was to “strike north” by attacking Manchuria and Siberia. The other option was “strike south” by attacking Western colonies in Southeast Asia, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. These military strategies stayed in Japanese military thinking until 1931, when the army, utilizing more political power, invaded Manchuria, and in 1937, went full-scale into China. China, at this point, was seen as weaker than the Soviet Union, as warlords controlled the country (1911–1926), and then a civil war broke out in 1927. The Japanese army preferred the strike north strategy, but by 1938, cracks in a victory in China began to show. In the following years, the United States would issue an oil embargo against Japan. Before the embargo in 1941, United States oil exports made up over 80% of Japan’s oil supply. Japan would start the strike south plan before the oil embargo and attack Pearl Harbor due to the United States having a more powerful, better-equipped navy.

While the Navy’s “Strike South” was driven by the oil embargo, it represented a monumental intelligence failure regarding domestic and near-shore reserves. Had Japan possessed modern technology such as seismic 3D mapping and deep-water drilling capabilities, the Strike North strategy toward Sakhalin would have been the mathematically superior choice. By securing Sakhalin, which we now know holds over 5 billion barrels, Japan could have achieved energy autarky without triggering a high-risk naval war with the United States. During the era, Japan needed about 31 million barrels of oil annually just to keep its captured territory, and Japanese intelligence believed that Sakhalin could only provide 1.2 to 4 million barrels per year. In contrast, the “Strike South” toward Indonesia offered a high-reward yield of 65 million barrels annually, which would have made the empire entirely self-sufficient. With modern data, we now know that Japan was standing on a “hidden giant.” Modern exploration has revealed that Sakhalin holds roughly 14 billion barrels in total reserves. Today, the island produces over 90 million barrels every year—nearly triple Japan’s entire 1941 requirement. Japan didn’t choose the “Strike South” because the oil wasn’t in the North; they chose it because they lacked the deep-water drilling technology to see it. The oil that Japan did not go to war for in 1941 remains a source of conflict today. Since Russia and Japan never signed a formal peace treaty ending World War II over the Kuril Islands, their joint energy projects in Sakhalin are constantly threatened by the same geopolitical ghost: the struggle for energy security in the Northern Pacific.

Intelligence and data play a role in how political actors take action, but just as important is the status quo. For four decades, the Cold War raged; there were times of highly intense standoff and more subdued periods. In 1961, the Soviets built a wall around West Berlin to keep the status quo of the East Berlin population contained. No one would have believed that 21 years later, the wall that divided families, communities, and friends would come down without gunpowder. The event was very unexpected, in part because it broke the status quo to create a new one, and we still feel its aftermath across Germany and Eastern Europe today.

When history is studied casually, events are often isolated from the longer processes that made them possible. Students might learn about the transatlantic slave trade and then, several lessons later, about the Scramble for Africa, as if two centuries of industrialization, technological change, and shifting global power dynamics were a simple bridge between them. The slow transformations that made European territorial conquest feasible are often compressed into silence. What feels sudden was, in reality, gradual.

When history is studied, there is an intense pressure to memorize dates, and yet when dates are memorized, it is easy to start thinking that six years (1939–1945) is not a long time. We can even do this easily within our own lives, especially when we know that there is an endpoint. For example, eight years doesn’t feel like a long time when you break it into high school and a bachelor’s degree. But imagine you are living through something, and you are regularly reminded that you are living through it, and you do not know when the event will end. Think of it this way: in the late 1800s and early 1900s, European monarchs knew that a big war was coming. When it did, their soldiers were convinced that with modern technology, the war would only last four months. It didn’t; they did get a truce on Christmas Day, but the Great War overall would last another three years, bringing millions of deaths, disease, revolution, and the fall of empires. Historical events do not care for our timelines.

The final historical roadblock is that history is often taught in a vacuum. This is partially the case before the 20th century. When studying regional history or a specific country, it is easy to forget the effects events had elsewhere. For example, the French and Indian War is just a regional factor of the wider Seven Years’ War, and that war did not just affect North America. The war started in Europe, between Prussia on one side and Austria, France, Russia, and Sweden on the other. The war was fought in India, as the Third Carnatic War, where the British and French East India companies fought for dominance. British forces fought the French in Africa. The British captured Manila, Philippines, from Spain. Spain and Portugal fought in South America. You’d think that this would be a First World War. But the sides of the Seven Years’ War were as coordinated as the Great War would be. Therefore, it’s easy to break off a region and see the effects following the war in that region. For example, in the U.S., the war leads into British taxation and American resettlement, to Revolution and Independence.

Another example would occur a few decades later: the American Revolution would contribute to inspiring the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Simón Bolívar. The French Revolution would lead to the rise of Napoleon, who sold land to the United States to fund the ongoing war with the British. The British would start kidnapping American sailors, leading to the War of 1812, which, ironicall,y is taught more in Canada than in the United States.

When history is studied casually, it is easy to overlook these factors that, when studied, make history complex all of a sudden. Humans are complex characters, and that is something that has never changed throughout the course of time, within every time period.