Cautionary historical tale asks if war with Japan during WWII could have been avoided

Could America have avoided war with Japan in 1941? That is the intriguing question that powers this compelling re-interpretation of diplomacy and military decisions in "Diplomats & Admirals" by former American naval officer and historian Dale A. Jenkins. Focusing solely on events between July 1941 to June 1942, Jenkins zeroes in on the disastrous misjudgments and mangled communications that bedeviled the upper echelons of power in Japan and America.

Jenkins positions his study as a “counter-revisionist” work that resurrects key sources of materials and original documents (many newly declassified) to blow the dust off “aging memories” and tell a new story that suggests the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 could have been averted if “essential interaction and communications” between senior civilian and military leaders had not failed so shockingly.

After a robust contextual analysis of the tense diplomatic interactions between the United States and Japan in the run-up to hostilities, Jenkin moves into a critique of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inner circle of Cabinet members who informally coalesced into his War Council: Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. These were the men tasked with advising the president on the correct course of action—who often failed, in Jenkins piercing conclusions.

Citing a “massive communications gap at the highest levels” of the U.S. government—specifically between the civilian War Council and senior naval officers—as the main reason behind America’s “muddled diplomacy” with Japan, Jenkins pinpoints the discrepant understandings of Japan’s military strength vis a vis America’s war readiness. The War...