1941 European
Citations (1)
- The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers whole source · open book
In Hitler’s case, the issue is complicated by his scorn for the United States as a degenerate, miscegenated power, but he also sensed that he dared not wait until the mid-1940s to resume his conquests, since the military balance would by then have decisively swung to the Anglo-French-American camp.164 On the Japanese side, because the United States was taken more seriously, the calculations were more precise: thus, the Japanese navy estimated that whereas its warship strength would be a respectable 70 percent of the American navy in late 1941, “this would fall to 65 percent in 1942, to 50 percent in 1943, and to a disastrous 30 percent in 1944.”165 Like Germany, Japan also had a powerful strategical incentive to move soon if it was going to escape from its fate as a middleweight nation in a world increasingly overshadowed by the superpowers.
chapter: The Offstage Superpowers