Comment on Irrationality Game II

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:59:02 GMT

Could you spell out what you mean by different definitions of "provoke"?

Well, "provocation" is one of those problematic words, in that nearly always, the party accused of "provocation" denies it -- and the act itself is therefore nearly always done in a way that attempts for some plausible deniability. So even if there is agreement on the facts of what happened, there is usually room for debate over whether an act constituted "provocation."

Anyhow, I am more concerned about the word "deliberate." The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions.

Of course. But under FDR, he and his inner circle did act in a fairly coherent way (and by extension, so did the entire pyramid of New Deal patronage that they headed). There were certainly individuals and institutions within the U.S. government outside of their control, but by 1941, they had been mostly side-stepped and pushed away into irrelevance.

For example, FDR explicitly rejected an oil embargo, yet oil exports stopped. Was this because his subordinates correctly interpreted his wishes? Or were they more belligerent? In Present at the Creation (p26) Acheson seems to say that he implemented the embargo by mistake, thinking that Japan had hidden assets that would keep the flow going. On the following page, he agrees to accept payment from a Latin American bank, but something goes awry, seemingly out of his control. Delong asks if FDR even knew of the embargo.

I wouldn't consider Acheson a credible source. Certainly, it's very naive to take anything written by the political actors of the New Deal/WW2 era at face value, and disentangling the real events from the available information is a task of enormous complexity and difficulty. That rabbit hole is very, very deep.

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