Assistant Professor of Government Ted Lehmann presented a paper titled “Anglo-American-Dutch Collusive Bargaining against Japanese Oil Autonomy in the post-World War One Era,” at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Honolulu on March 31.
Lehmann joined a distinguished panel of Japanese scholars re-examining the roots of the Pacific War, including former Ambassador Takeo Iguchi and author of the recent volume Demystifying Pearl Harbor. Lehmann argued that Japan's oil dependency on America was purposefully created in the 1920s and manipulated in the late 1930s to preserve leverage over Japan's strategic choices to either join Germany in the attack against the Soviet Union or instead attack Anglo-American-Dutch forces in southeast Asia for the oil of the Dutch East Indies.
