By the Editor – Arrogance mixed with complacency and ignorance is a cocktail of vices that frequently portended the West’s most calamitous moments in history. Do we learn? Or are we doomed to repeat failings until irrelevance is achieved? The author highlights the lessons of misreading the signs. The horrors of the Pacific War were hardly imaginable to the British government when it signed an alliance with Japan in 1902. But the two countries had very different political cultures and the contrast increased with nationalistic Japanese education, their involvement in a brutal war in China in the…
