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Vladimir_M comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion
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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."
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.
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.
It seems to me very different to say that it is difficult to assess whether something is a provocation than to say that there are some definitions of provocation under which it is and some under which it isn't.
Do you think Acheson would lie about external facts, like whether he offered to let the Japanese pay with money in a Latin American bank account?
If we could read minds (including those in the past), it would probably be possible to come to agreement about which concrete acts have been provocations in all cases, by looking for the mens rea: was the given act specifically motivated by the desire to induce a hostile reaction?
But since we can't read minds, the practical criteria for what counts as "provocation" are murky, and they are typically a mixture of attempts to evaluate indirect evidence about motives and attempts to define certain acts in certain contexts as ipso facto provocative. So there is lots of difficulty on both fronts, even if there is a general agreement on what happened: it's hard to evaluate the evidence about motives correctly, and there is also disagreement on which acts qualify as ipso facto provocative.
In this concrete case, some people would say that the actions of the U.S. government prior to Pearl Harbor were ipso facto provocative, i.e. that they were far outside of the limits of reasonable behavior of someone who is not actively trying to provoke hostility. Others would say that it isn't so, and they'd presumably also claim that there is no clear evidence about motives to pronounce the verdict of "provocation."
It strikes me as wildly implausible that someone relatively low in the pecking order, like Acheson in 1941, could have been in a position to make such tremendous history-shaping decisions on his own whim and without directions from above. So I think his account presents, at best, a strong lawyerly spin on the events with plenty of important omissions, even if there is no outright lying.
Now, why the oil embargo was instituted in this particular puzzling way, I don't know. I've never found the time to sit down and study all the available sources in detail. However, it seems to me that the most probable explanation is that FDR and his clique wanted to execute the embargo in a duplicitous and plausibly deniable way (which would be very much within their usual modus operandi), so they tried to make it look like an underling did the paperwork of export licensing a bit too eagerly, and then also the Japanese unreasonably failed to do the correct bureaucratic procedure, etc., etc.