The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor half a century ago started a war that may not have ended with the Japanese military defeat. Some Central Intelligence Agency analysts believe the Japanese are continuing the struggle with economic weapons.
These backroom strategists think they have detected a pattern in Japanese history of 100-year wars. The Japanese approach to warfare, they contend, is to continue fighting with economic and diplomatic weapons when military force fails.The analysts quote a Japanese general who surrendered to the British in Singapore at the end of World War II. He is alleged to have said, "We have merely lost the first battle. We still have 96 years to go." The Japanese have done more damage to American industrial centers with their economic weapons than they ever achieved with bombs, the analysts say. They speak of an economic Pearl Harbor that has devastated such targets as Detroit, Pittsburgh, Houston and Silicon Valley.
We don't subscribe to this conspiratorial view. It's not the Japanese who need bashing but our own political leaders. America's economic predicament, we suggest, is the work of failed policies, self-serving politics and myopia. The connecting thread has been the postponement of inconvenient consequences until the next fellow's term. We are only willing to regard America's economic struggle as an extension of World War II if it will help mobilize the nation. In a sense, the United States is engaged in warfare. World War II was the hot war, which America won. World War III turned out to be the Cold War. America won that, too. If World War IV is an economic war, then the United States is losing it.
Our country faces an economic crisis that could drastically change our way of life. The 1990s have arrived with a turbulence that has shattered a long complacency - the federal budget shambles, the savings and loan fiasco, the Persian Gulf eruption, the skidding economy.
Yet these are merely the advance tremors. Before this decade is over, Washington will be rocked by debt explosion, credit collapse, foreign commercial supremacy, economic plunge and a dozen other stored-up reckonings.
The populace, long lulled by sleeping neglect, will be jerked awake to violent turmoil as paper fortunes disintegrate, as a sinking standard of living rekindles class warfare, as fiscal stringencies cause the young to revolt against tax support of the old, as those who compete with imports demand protection against those who depend on exports.
The timing mechanisms are ticking remorselessly. They will go off when certain tolerances are breached by the mathematics of multiplying debt, by the falling line on the competitiveness graph, by the dead stall of the productivity meter and by the erosion of confidence in American institutions.
We say this while proclaiming that it is not too late. Winning World War IV will demand sacrifice, not the supreme sacrifice of the soldier who gives his life, but the sacrifice of time, luxury and self-indulgence. The black clouds we have sighted on the horizon can still be dispelled. The approaching calamities can be averted. It is not too late. But it will take the toughness that built America in the first place.