What was at stake for the US, first of all, was the defense against a very real military threat to its national territory, against a power which, at the minimum, had to be classified as an incredible aggressive form of imperialism, having already conquered Korea, western China, most of Southeast Asia, and quickly taking the Philippines in the first months of the war. You would think that some minimal facts, like the fact that the US was drawn into W.W.II when the Japanese launched an attack, without any declaration of war, which destroyed the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and left Hawaii and Alaska quite vulnerable to Japanese invasion. There never was a serious military threat to the US across the Atlantic, but there sure as hell was one in the Pacific. Real military preparations against invasion were made not just in Hawaii and Alaska, but also on the western coasts of the US and Canada at the start of W.W.II.
Second, the notion that Japan had nothing in common with fascism, and that this simply was a war of European racism against the "yellow peril," can only be made in the absence of any real consideration about the nature of the Japanese regime, carefully ignoring not only its incredibly aggressive imperialism, but also its vicious racist occupation of places such as Korea and China [the kidnapping and importation of Korean women into brothels for Japanese troops, the "rape" of Nanking] and the authoritarian rule it exercised at home. There is a reason why, even today, there is such a visceral antipathy toward Japan in those countries.
No American with anti-racist principles is going to deny the shameful history of anti-Asian (much more anti-Chinese than anti-Japanese) racism in the US, or the fact that W.W.II was the occasion for some vicious manifestations of it, as in the internment of the Japanese-Americans and the decision to use the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But to reduce the war against Japan to that phenomenon, and to simply ignore the character and actions of the Japanese regime, is willful blindness.
Third, holding on to colonies may very well have been a British or French obsession with regard to Asia, but not an American. American domination of Asia has always been much of a modern form of imperialism, one in which colonization played, at best, a marginal role, limited to brief interregnums in cases such as the Philippines. Americans didn't know or care then who Marshall Slim was, and I'd be willing to bet that if we asked the Americans on this list today who he was and they answered honestly, most still would not know. The slogan was not "The sun never sets of the American empire."
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --