As Putin Gets Desperate, U.S. Should Remember Pearl Harbor

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The Western powers are tightening the screws on Russian President Vladimir Putin: The next move appears to be a phased-in European ban on purchases of Russian oil.

It's the right policy, given that oil money is financing Putin's war in Ukraine and keeping the Russian economy alive. But the risks may be substantial: Revisionist powers have sometimes become most violent when campaigns of economic strangulation against them are about to succeed.

The classic example is Japan before World War II. For a decade, Tokyo had been seeking a vast empire in Asia. It had embarked on a military rampage, seizing Manchuria, invading China and expanding into Southeast Asia.

The U.S. was initially slow to respond. But eventually, Japan's bid for regional dominance, the brutality of its tactics in China — bombing of cities to incite terror, systematic killing of civilians, the use of biological weapons — made an enemy of Washington.

By 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration was supporting the Chinese government financially. The next spring, American warplanes and volunteer pilots began arriving in China.

Most important, Washington took the fight to Japan economically. Roosevelt first constricted the export of aviation materials, high-octane gas, scrap metal and other goods to Tokyo. After Japanese forces moved into southern Indochina in mid-1941, FDR delivered the hammer blow: A full oil embargo.

Japan was vulnerable to economic coercion. Before World War II, writes historian Waldo Heinrichs, Japan “imported 80 percent of its oil products, 90 percent of its gasoline, 74 percent of its scrap iron and 60 percent of its machine tools” from the U.S.

The oil cutoff was particularly devastating. It threatened to leave Japan's ships and planes running on fumes and bring the war in China to a humiliating end. Japanese military officials, having promised glorious conquests, now feared that the country was facing strategic ruin at America's hands. Japan was “like a fish in a pond from which the water was gradually being drained away,” as one War Ministry official later put it.

Rather than concede, Japan's leaders risked everything, by seizing oil-rich colonies in Southeast Asia, attacking U.S. and Western possessions across much of the Asia-Pacific, and trying to wipe out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

At the time, few Japanese leaders believed that they could defeat America in a long war. Yet sometimes, said military strongman Hideki Tojo, “One must conjure up enough courage, close one's eyes, and jump.”

As with any historical analogy, it's important not to overdraw the contemporary parallels. The oil embargo and other sanctions imposed on Japan were more crippling than the punishments inflicted on Putin today. And one crucial reason Japan opted for war in 1941 was that it had a tempting window of military opportunity because the U.S. had been so slow to rearm after its post-World War I military drawdown.

As Japan's rapid gains in the months after Pearl Harbor showed, Tokyo possessed — if only fleetingly — a degree of military superiority over Washington that Putin does not enjoy today.

But the Russian leader does have options for making things worse. He could, as Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns warned, use tactical nuclear weapons inside Ukraine. Or he could launch cyberattacks, physical sabotage campaigns, or even conventional military strikes against the countries that are supplying Ukraine with weapons and choking Russia with sanctions.

The rhetoric out of Russia has certainly become more ominous as awareness of the country's terrible predicament sets in. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the contest in Ukraine as a proxy war in which the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are trying to destroy Russia. The Russian Orthodox church has deemed the conflict a holy war.

The Russian government is increasingly invoking the memory of World War II, a zero-sum contest for national survival. Taking their cues from Putin, who has regularly hinted at the prospect of nuclear escalation, Russian propagandists are talking in apocalyptic tones.

Putin himself does not seem suicidal. But if he worries that he might not survive, politically or physically, a military defeat in Ukraine or the slow death of the Russian economy, his incentive to close his eyes and jump could be strong indeed.

As the war drags on, the U.S. and its friends will ratchet up the coercion of Russia, to increase the price Putin pays and gradually deprive him of the wherewithal to keep fighting. Yet the closer they get to succeeding, the more they will sharpen the choice Putin faces between accepting a humiliating defeat and intensifying his aggression in hopes of salvaging a victory.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

Sanctions Haven't Made Clear What Counts as “Russian Oil”: Julian Lee
Japan's Path to World War II Shows Risks of Trump's Huawei Ban: James Gibney
Ukraine War Is Depleting America's Arsenal of Democracy: Hal Brands

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Most recently, he is the author of "The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today."