As the author of this book observes in his preface, a long time has passed since the last appearance of a primary source-based diplomatic history of American‒Japanese relations in the period prior to the Pacific War. This is, of course, largely due to the fact that historians of the modern era, and doctoral students in particular, tend in their work to chase the archives and the latest methodological trends. With most of the documents on the pre-1941 period having long since been released and with diplomatic history having fallen out of favour, it is no surprise therefore that there has been a dearth of new studies. In producing this volume, Pash is content both to use the existing documents and to use an avowedly diplomatic history approach. His justification for what might strike some as an anachronistic approach is, as David Reynolds has noted elsewhere, the simple and obvious truth that understanding the origins of war is one of the central tasks that faces historians. Moreover, Pash believes that he has new things to say about this familiar subject and that the existing historiography requires revision.

The period covered by this volume is fairly broad for a modern diplomatic history, but it is important to note that the years prior to 1937 are covered in much less detail than the immediate origins of the Pacific War. This is clearly not accidental, for the intention behind the book is largely to put American policy during the fateful years of 1940‒1 in a broader historical context. Pash's argument is that American policy towards Japan from 1905 onwards can be defined as one of containment, which is to say that the United States sought to restrain the Japanese from being able to challenge and overthrow the ‘open door’ in China. Pash contends that the success of this policy varied from administration to administration, with the chief variable being the realism with which each administration approached Japan. For example, he judges Theodore Roosevelt to have achieved considerable success, for while he was not averse to wielding the ‘big stick’, he also recognized the need for diplomatic engagement. In addition, he bravely states the case for the Lansing‒Ishii agreement of 1917 as a realistic and sensible initiative. Meanwhile, he categorizes Taft as a failure, for his more ideological ‘dollar diplomacy’ only alienated Japan and led it to establish an informal accord with Tsarist Russia.

That an American diplomatic historian should choose realism as his framing device is, of course, hardly novel, but especially in this first part of the book, Pash uses it well to illuminate policy-making and its travails. The problem, though, with seeing things through the lens of realism is that it is rather a blunt tool and one that does not take much account of the changing ways in which practitioners approached policy-making and the context within which policy is made. This problem is evident when Pash looks at the Washington Conference of 1921‒2, which he contends led to a flawed settlement because it did not lead to a clear recognition of Japan's formal and informal empire (the latter referring to its interests in Manchuria). But would it have been possible for the Western powers to have acted in such a way in the age of ‘new diplomacy’? An illustration of the problems that Pash is contending with here emerges in relation to his statement that the Harding administration's pressure on Britain to end the Anglo-Japanese alliance was ‘Washington's greatest blunder of the decade’; the assumption being that its continuation would have allowed Britain to moderate Japan's ambitions. Well, one could make that argument, but to do so is miss the fact that some elements both in Britain and Japan saw the alliance as an anachronism in a world now defined by the League of Nations. In other words, it is an argument that ignores the change in normative values that transformed international politics from 1917 onwards.

What then does his concentration on realism mean for his treatment of the main focus of this book, the policy pursued by the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941 and especially its diplomacy in the final year of peace? As one might suspect from his framework, Pash is primarily interested in the degree to which the adoption by Washington of a more realistic policy towards Japan might have avoided the outbreak of war. In this regard, his analysis of the context in which policy was made produces some interesting and telling observations about why a wholly realist approach was difficult to follow. For example, he argues that one of the problems that bedevilled American policy was that its perception of Japanese military capabilities did not tally with the reality. The United States therefore underestimated both the chance of Japan entering the global struggle and the effect of any such venture. In this, he is absolutely correct, although his caution about whether this can be attributed to racial thinking is, I believe, misplaced. In addition, he rightly acknowledges that the spectre of appeasement came to haunt American policy-makers and that there was no desire for an East Asian ‘Munich’.

Where, though, Pash is less successful is in judging what was possible in a bilateral American‒Japanese relationship when set against the other dramatic global events of 1941. What is surprising here is that, while Pash includes Waldo Heinrichs’ very fine study, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War 2 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1988) in his bibliography, he does not refer much to that book's insights. This is unfortunate, for the greatest contribution that Heinrichs made in this volume was to demonstrate the degree of interaction between American‒Japanese relations and the global context. In particular, Heinrichs’ work shed light on one of the turning points that Pash quite rightly identifies – the American decision in July 1941 to introduce an asset freeze and a complete embargo on oil exports – by showing that this move was designed by Roosevelt to prevent the Japanese from advancing either north or south; in other words, the President was just as worried about a potential Japanese strike against the Soviet Union. This is an important, and I think convincing, explanation, but Pash does not address it. In addition, he over-states the degree of Russian and British military success in the autumn of 1941; let us not forget that German troops were but 20 miles from Moscow in late November and that Leningrad had already been under siege for over two months with no sign of relief.

Pash thus understands and explains most of the factors that constrained American policy in 1941, but falls short of providing the complete picture. The result is that, while much of what he writes is convincing, the incomplete global context leads him to contend that there were still chances for a different road to be taken. In this regard, he is undoubtedly right in arguing that American policy was misconceived and that it wasted a chance for peace by viewing the Hull‒Nomura talks almost solely as a means of gaining time for rearmament, but it is the full global picture that explains why, in the end, this had to be the case and why it was so difficult to break from the road to war. Would Teddy Roosevelt or Lansing really have acted any differently?

However, while Pash probably over-states the case for avoiding war in 1941, he does make valuable criticisms of US policy at other earlier points. In particular, his analysis of the period between August 1939 and May 1940 includes a useful retelling of Joseph Grew's conviction that the United States could have made more of the Japanese desire to see the renewal of its commercial treaty with America. Overall, then this is quite a valuable new study. It does not set the world alight or make as rigorous a revisionist case as one might expect, but it does require the reader to think again about how they understand the evolution of American‒Japanese relations and the tragic road to war.