Fair enough. That summer, while Roosevelt, his

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That summer, while Roosevelt, his trusted adviser Harry Hopkins and U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles were attending the shipboard conference off Newfoundland and Secretary of State Cordell Hull was on vacation at the Greenbrier in West Virginia, the authority to grant licenses to export and pay for oil and other goods was in the hands of a three-person interagency committee.

http://www.theglobalist.com/day-lives-infamy-...er-7-1941/

It was dominated by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whom one historian described as the “quintessential opportunist of U.S. foreign policy in 1941.”

Oil as a weapon

Acheson favored a “bullet-proof freeze” on oil shipments to Japan, claiming it would not provoke war because “no rational Japanese could believe that an attack on us could result in anything but disaster for his country.”

With breathtaking confidence in his own judgment, and ignoring the objections of others in the State Department, Acheson refused to grant licenses to Japan to pay for goods in dollars. That effectively ended Japan’s ability to ship oil and all other goods from the United States.

Acheson’s actions cut off all American trade with Japan. When Roosevelt returned, he decided not to overturn the “state of affairs” initiated by Acheson, apparently because he feared he would otherwise be regarded as an appeaser.

Once Roosevelt perpetuated Acheson’s trade embargo, the planners in Japan’s imperial military headquarters knew that oil to fuel their fleet, as well as rubber, rice and other vital reserves, would soon run out.

By the end of the year at the latest, Japan would need to capture new supply sources in the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, which the United States would surely oppose. And to protect its long exposed flank as it moved south, the Japanese Navy would have to deliver a knockout blow to U.S. naval and air power in the Pacific.

Without oil, Japan could not survive a long war. The blow would be delivered at Pearl Harbor.

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