Steve Kemper, author most recently of Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor, joins the show to talk about the political chaos in Tokyo in the years leading up to WWII and the man that tried to keep the peace, U.S. AmbassadorJoseph C. Grew.▪️Times • 01:18 Introduction • 01:50 Who was Joseph C. Grew? • 04:36 Japanese politics in the ’30s • 07:30 Imperial Army vs Imperial Navy • 11:00 First impressions • 17:31 Insurrection • 22:12 Drifting towards war • 26:08 Dynamics in D.C. • 28:24 Appeasement • 35:05 Japan’s plans • 37:40 Embargoes and FDR • 42:48 Distinct parallels
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This podcast seeks to learn what war teaches. There has been a steady decline in the study of military history and its associated theoretical discipline, strategy.This podcast seeks to fill that gap through in-depth interviews on military and diplomatic history. Our guests have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and former China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher. We discuss the battlefield commanders, diplomats, strategists, policymakers, and statesmen who have had to make wartime decisions in the ancient and modern eras. The subject of an episode may be an historical battle, campaign, o...