Was it Smoot Hawley, or Reparations for WW1?
Japan had chosen the British Model, they saw the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere as a tool for expansion and economic dominance, they wanted to be the British Empire of the 18th Century in the 19th Century.
And I would say that is a false argument, Smoot Hawley effected imports, not exports, what kicked off WW2 in the Pacific was embargos on shipping oil and steel to Japan, it had nothing whatever to do with Smoot.
Additionally, the decrease in trade could just as easily be attributed to the general Recession that rebounded around the world.
Smoot has become something of a shiboleth, and wars have not stopped being fought, far from it, if anything wars in the future will be far more bloody, how close did India and Pakistan come to a nuclear exchange in the 90’s?
Both. Both were very primitive short sighted economics. Germany was in the most fundamental and true sense, bankrupt, both financially, politically and physically.
Smoot was another simple, dumb, economically ignorant, and protective of, in the case of the Utah Smoot family fortune, and others. Smoot hurt the mass of leaving the farm, entering the urban factory worker.
On the international side, since Wilson, the US and others had been working to increase world trade, rebuild Europe, and promote Democracies. That was all discredited by Smoot. All of it.
You’ll notice after this recent crisis, no country introduced any trade protections. Not a one. That tells you something.