Imperial Japan fought two pairs of wars. In the first pair, Japan co-operated with maritime powers to work in concert with their preferred maritime global order based on the maritime commons, international law, and international commerce – all common, not exclusive, places, rules, and activities. In the second set of wars, Japan allied with the continental powers, bent on imposing a continental order based on exclusive spheres of influence, each operating under different rules. Imperial Japan flourished under the former and perished under the latter.

The maritime world order is positive-sum. For all its many flaws, it is the only world order that benefits all who join because its laws and institutions are designed to promote economic growth in order to create wealth. The common rules protect the weak from the strong and thus incentivize the weak to join. The aggregate power of the many then dwarfs the strength of even the greatest continental power. Continental world orders – the world of traditional empires that flourished prior to the Industrial Revolution – are zero-sum at best and more typically negative-sum, given all the fighting over the spheres of influence. The motivating goals are the confiscation of territory and wealth, but the wars entail damage to both, producing a negative sum. The continental paradigm characterized the preindustrial world when land was indeed the source of wealth because agriculture was the primary economic sector. After the Industrial Revolution, trade, industry, and service became the primary economic sectors, so land was no longer the ultimate source of power, money was. Money bought armies. And money came mainly from industry, commerce, and service.

Japan was not geographically situated to become a great land power. Seas separated it from military theaters so under all circumstances, except an invasion of the home islands, it operated on extended lines. It lacked the natural resource endowment necessary to conduct war: iron and energy.

The military eclipse of civil authority marked a return to the pre-Meiji Restoration balance between civil and military institutions. During the shogunates, the army had ruled. But army rule was a throwback to a system no longer adequate to navigate the problems Japan faced. Its modern army missed the strategic advantages conferred by an island location to misidentify Japan as a continental, not a maritime, power. This led to a succession of errors of commission: the universal answer to problems in China became escalation. This produced a protracted war for control of the Asian mainland that need never have been fought. There were better ways to achieve the policy objective of restoring domestic prosperity and maintaining Japan as a great power.

The Sino-Japanese conflagration that broke out in 1931 ignited an accumulation of highly combustible grievances. World War I had destroyed the European political system and the Great Depression had destroyed the global economic system. Both the Great War and the Great Depression were of unprecedented scale. Botched military strategy in the former followed by botched economic strategy in the latter put Fascism and Communism on the march as the only two political systems apparently capable of restoring economic health. As the countries of the world tried to navigate these turbulent uncharted waters, they became increasingly focused on their own dire situations and ever less cognizant of the equally dire situations of their neighbors. This blinded them to the interests of others and to the likely countermeasures to their own policy choices. Escalation became the name of the game.

Army leaders, their many civilian supporters, and the Japanese public perceived no alternative to an aggressive foreign policy in China in order to overcome the Great Depression and to counter Russian territorial and ideological expansion. They faced an intractable dilemma: good citizenship in the prevailing global order promised economic disaster with the collapse of international trade caused by Western protectionism.

Botched war termination in regional wars usually produces one of two outcomes: either the war protracts when the weaker belligerent launches an insurgency with economy-killing and budget-busting consequences for the counterinsurgent or the war escalates when an interested third party intervenes on the opposing side. The most common way to avoid such unpleasant eventualities is to offer peace terms generous relative to the military disposition of forces. The need to offer a generous peace is particularly important for the invading power because the value of victory is usually considerably higher for those living in theater than for those intervening from afar. This means a greater likelihood for those in theater to endure high costs and protraction. As a testament to Japan's strategy, it produced both a nationwide insurgency and multiple great-power allies for Chiang Kai-shek.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, Japan had suffered 600,000 casualties in China, a sunk cost of stupendous proportions that its leaders found difficult to justify to the Japanese people. Japan's situation was reminiscent of great powers in World War I that were equally incapable of reassessing the flawed military strategies that consumed the lives of a generation of young men. So the old men kept applying greater doses of the same tried and trashed remedies, rather than own up to their enormous failures.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 offered Japan hope in the form of a perceived window of opportunity, akin to the ones the Meiji generation had so successfully seized in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. With the fall of France in June 1940, Japan pressured Britain to close the Burma Road in July, putting Chiang Kai-shek in his worst situation since the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. German control of continental Europe promised open season in Asia for Japan to liberate by conquest the colonies that others could no longer defend. An Asia-wide empire, the Imperial Japanese Army hoped, would justify the sunk costs in China.