Peacemaking with Japan
By August 1945 Japan had been at war for eight years. It had fought China since 1937, and it attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. When the fighting stopped, the victors had to decide how to treat a defeated Japan so that it would not threaten its neighbours again.
The settlement they produced is one of the clearest examples of a peace that held. Japan never went to war again after 1945, and it became one of the USA's closest allies in the Pacific. That makes it a useful case study of causality. The way a war is ended, and who controls the ending, shapes whether peace lasts.
How the Pacific War itself was brought to an end is covered in the lesson on the nature of World War II. A full comparison with the peace imposed on Germany in 1919 belongs to the lesson on creating a lasting peace.
Keep one question in mind throughout. Which features of the settlement made the peace last, and which of them mattered most?
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