Aims Of Germany And Japan Essay, Research Paper

The Aims of Germany and Japan

The 1930s were a tumultuous time. After World War I, the Allied powers

seemed determined to preserve peace, but Germany and Japan held a shared

goal of world domination. In two memorandums about the plans of Germany

and Japan, U.S. officials make the position that the United States should take

plain: mobilize and be ready for war, but do not provoke it. In other words,

?Speak softly but carry a big stick.? Although Germany and Japan had a few

similar goals and ideas, they differed on other issues of subject peoples and races.

Both Germany and Japan had plans to rule the world. They began their

conquests in the early- to mid-1930s, Japan with Manchuria in 1931 and Germany

with the Rhineland in 1936. These occupations would eventually lead to WWII.

Germany and Japan also wanted to control trade and have a political

influence in the countries that surrounded them. For Germany, it was a matter of

national pride. They wanted to show that Germany was still a great state after

their humiliating defeat in WWI. The expansionists of Japan felt that ?Japan?s

destiny is to subjugate and rule the world?. There was no tinge of revenge to the

Japanese conquests.

The main difference between Germany and Japan was that the Japanese

military had the power to defeat other countries without the permission of the

government. The German government not only gave permission, they persuaded

the German people to support their hunger for territory.

Germany was intensely xenophobic. All peoples other than ?Aryans? were

persecuted. They intended to annihilate the Jews and breed out the Slavic

people. The memorandum concerning Japan does not give evidence of

xenophobia in Japan, but neither does it imply that the Japanese were

completely tolerant of other races.

Germany and Japan had many similarities in their foreign policies. The

differences in their ideology before WWII were not very major because they still

had one common goal: world domination.