North Korea's Kim Jong Un and lessons of Pearl Harbor

This week, I went to Pearl Harbor. It is a place every American should visit.

The National Park Service offers tickets, but there are so many visitors that most people have to join a private tour to get in. After Hawaii had a missile scare, Pearl Harbor was on many people's minds this week.

We took an excellent tour with Keith from Discover Hawaii. He told us an amazing story. His father was a young child playing in his backyard on Saturday, Dec. 6, 1941. He saw a plane overhead and recognized it as a plane from Japan, as it had the sun symbol on it. The pilot looked down on him with a set of binoculars. Clearly, the Japanese were scouting areas in Hawaii before they bombed.

There were 2,403 killed on Dec. 7, 1941. While that's not as many as 9/11, it's an incredible number, especially when the United States population was 133.4 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

There are many conspiracy theories, including that President Roosevelt knew it was going to happen and wanted an excuse for entering the war. I am not a believer in that theory.

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There are some lessons to be learned from Pearl Harbor, especially concerning why Japan decided to bomb the American forces that December day.

Supposedly, there were talks in Washington, D.C., happening right until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The man who designed the attack was not against America. His name was Adm. Isiroku Yamatomo. He had studied as a "special student" at Harvard for almost three years, and he hitch-hiked across America. He liked America but felt loyalty to Japan.

Why then did Japan attack? My view is that it felt it had nothing to lose. The United States had imposed an oil embargo and President Roosevelt ordered the freezing of all Japanese assets in America in July 1941. In 1941, Japan had only 18 months of oil reserves. Roosevelt also closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping.

There were some geopolitical factors as well. The Japanese had gotten the Vichy government in France to allow its troops into French Indochina. Japan desperately needed natural resources, and this would help them get them. The Japanese had developed the "Essentials of Policy toward the South Seas," which allowed peaceful expansion unless the Allied forces threatened an embargo. There was also a "Proposal B," where Japan would withdraw its troops from parts of Indochina if the United States unfroze Japan's assets.

Roosevelt was trying to punish Japan for its 1931 invasion of Manchuria in what is now China. With a limited oil supply, not being able to ship through the Panama Canal and with its assets frozen in the United States, Japan reasoned, what did it have to lose?

That kind of reasoning is dangerous, especially considering the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war that ensued.

Americans should be concerned that North Korea's Kim Jong Un may make the same mistaken reasoning. If the U.S. uses the United Nations to cut off trade, food support, oil and also foreign workers bringing back hard currency, North Korea might feel, as Japan did, that it has nothing to lose.

According to ABC News: "China accounts for nearly all of the isolated North's trade and energy supplies. Beijing has imposed limits on oil sales and cut deeply into the North's foreign revenue by ordering North Korean businesses in China to close, sending home migrant workers and banning purchases of its coal, textiles, seafood and other exports.

"Imports from the North shrank 81.6 percent to $54 million in December while exports to the isolated, impoverished country contracted 23.4 percent to $260 million, said a spokesman for the Chinese customs agency, Huang Songping.

"The U.N. Security Council has steadily tightened trade restrictions as leader Kim Jong Un's government pressed ahead with nuclear and missile development in defiance of foreign pressure."

While it may look as if China is the one behind the trade restrictions and limits on oil sales, no one is taken in by China being the bad guy. Kim Jong Un is developing missiles aimed at the United States. He has not set his sights on China.

We have lessons to learn about why Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, and giving a country like North Korea nothing to lose is the main lesson here. It will not be fooled by China's actions. It knows it's the U.S. that wants to cut off trade and oil, just like with Japan in 1941.

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