Does it really say that at the Daily Beast? (I can't follow the link at my current venue.) Not only did the navy anticipate the invention of aircraft, they followed the premise through to the development of the aircraft carrier. True genius!
Yes, yes it does.
Just incredible.
On the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks, Flags of Our Fathers author James Bradley explains how the U.S. under Teddy Roosevelt first meddled in Asian affairs—and why we’re playing a dangerous game in doing so again.Pretty much "peaceful chinee threatened by American Imperialism"I always assumed that my father—John Bradley—had raised two American flags on the island of Iwo Jima because of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor 65 years ago today. But unbeknownst to my dad, 88 years before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy had eyed Iwo Jima as a potential staging area for naval operations aimed at China.
In 1853, U.S. Navy warships entered the North Pacific with the largest show of naval power the area had ever seen. The three neighboring countries—Japan, Korea, and China—had been at peace with one another for centuries.
The Navy’s goal in 1853 was to make Japan into what a Japanese prime minister later called “America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific” in order to compete for influence in nearby China. The pretext given to the American public was that the Navy was on a humanitarian mission to halt mistreatment of American whalers shipwrecked on Japanese shores.
Twenty years later, in 1873, Japan launched its first modern overseas military foray—an invasion of Taiwan. The rationale was to threaten China, thus allowing Japan to wrest the island of Okinawa from China’s orbit, an idea cooked up by the Japanese foreign ministry’s first foreign employee—a retired American Civil War general. The excuse was that the Taiwanese had abused Okinawan civilians. The Japanese invaders sailed on American-made ships with U.S. Navy advisers. In 1894, Americans applauded as a newly militarized Japan attacked China to promote “peace and stability” on the Korean Peninsula.
Then in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt secretly urged Japanese leaders to develop a “Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia.” Roosevelt encouraged the Japanese navy to seize “a paramount interest in what surrounds the Yellow Sea, just as the United States has a paramount interest in what surrounds the Caribbean.” Unknown to Congress and his own State Department, Theodore Roosevelt agreed to a secret, unconstitutional treaty with Tokyo allowing the Japanese military to seize Korea and initiate their Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia.
When the United States and Japan later quarreled over who would control China, war broke out. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt condemned that day of infamy, not realizing that the Japanese navy had modeled their Pearl Harbor attack after a similar surprise naval operation in Korean and Chinese harbors 37 years earlier. In 1904, when word of Japan’s first infamous sneak attack reached him, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote secretly, “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”
U.S. Marines raise the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on this Feb. 23, 1945. (Photo: Joe Rosenthal / AP Photo) The U.S. Navy is continuing Theodore Roosevelt’s game in Asia. In June, North Koreans fired on and killed three Chinese civilians on their northern border and Washington viewed it as a minor incident. In November, when North Korea tragically killed four South Koreans, President Barack Obama led the China-bashing and dispatched thousands of warships, tens of thousands of troops, and billions of dollars of high-tech weapons to the coast of China.
Simpler explanation for the Perry expedition (which is also the explanation for most historical events): Trade