Rearview Mirror
Making an Offer You Can't Accept: The Art of Onus Shifting
The "Godfather" movies made famous the idea of a Mafia offer one couldn't refuse. But for a state it is just as important to be able to make an offer one cannot accept so it can demonstrate supposed good faith that has been rejected by the other side. Sometimes the exercise is called onus shifting; in legal procedures it can mean shifting the burden of proof. Few countries declare a war or enter an ongoing one without protesting their defensive intentions. Imperial powers claim the need to discipline or subjugate barbarian tribes raising trouble just outside their frontiers. Modern states work to demonstrate the responsibility of their adversaries.
In the broader arena of world politics, the objective is to demonstrate to global public opinion, international bodies, and perhaps most important, to a state's own citizenry that there was no conscionable alternative to forcing the showdown it felt obliged to pursue. Consider some examples. The British government had negotiated a decade of military agreements with France for common action in the case of a possible war with Germany as of 1914; still no formal alliance existed and the Liberal cabinet was concerned that significant opposition might emerge to entering an impending war on the side of France. German plans for a possible two-front war required a rapid advance through Belgium. Britain's 1839 commitment as a guarantor of the treaty establishing an independent and neutral Belgium facilitated parliament’s declaration of war on Germany. To the German ambassador in London, Britain was going to war for "a scrap of paper." The scrap of paper hardly determined the Anglo-French entente, but it helped justify its response.
In the case of the United States, defense of its rights as a neutral to trade with one or both of the warring parties was key to intervention in 1812 in the long clash between Britain and France after 1792, then again in 1917 in the war between Germany and its Franco-British enemies on the Western Front. The right to trade as a neutral soon merged with the right to defend its citizens' property abroad that would justify interventions in the Americas and the Middle East. The story of those interventions, in the interwar and post-World War II years becomes the story of American empire, whether "empire for liberty" or empire for profits and property, or for faith or influence, or for the self-confirmation of an elite, or in the best case out of despair at unchecked despotism abroad. Each requires its own narrative. Here I am interested in the process of justification as exemplified in the run-up to U.S. participation in World War II.
Franklin Roosevelt was a master of onus shifting even as he insisted the US wanted to remain neutral in the great conflicts brewing in the 1930s as he sought simultaneously to defend democracy from the advance of fascism. By the summer of 1940 that meant defending Britain. Did he believe that he could adequately preserve Britain from Nazi conquest in 1940 with just the amendment of the neutrality acts enacted earlier by an isolationist Congress? Once the danger of direct German invasion seemed averted, Britain faced the peril of the U-Boat campaign that threatened shut off needed imports. By the spring of 1941 FDR secured the passage of Lend Lease. FDR was committed to helping Britain survive but insisted that the U.S. could do so without formally entering the war. Did he really believe this or was he just trying to edge into the war without a backlash from isolationist opinion? Was the commitment to use American destroyers to escort supplies halfway to Britain designed to provoke the Germans into recapitulating the unrestricted submarine warfare of World War I that had led to U.S. intervention in 1917. Hitler, in any case, seemed determined to resist that dénouement until the U.S. found itself at war with Japan and defending possessions in the Pacific.
When Japan annexed Manchuria in 1931-32, the Roosevelt administration had contented itself with Secretary of State Henry Stimson's announcement that it would recognize no changes brought about by force to existing treaties and territories. The further Japanese invasion of China that followed in 1937 showed the insufficiency of this response. The Japanese occupation of French Indochina after France had effectively surrendered to Germany in the summer of 1940 led President Roosevelt to demand by mid 1941 that the Japanese relinquish their control, not only of Indochina, but, at the behest of the Chinese government based now in the interior, areas that the Japanese were occupying in China. At the same time, his military advisers counselled restraint in threatening the Japanese. American naval resources were required to sustain escort operations in supplying Britain.
Understanding the dependence oi the Japanese Navy on access to oil, the Americans decided to block Japan's access to American petroleum supplies. By this point the Japanese government was too deeply committed to its position to yield. The Americans would not accept the Japanese proposal for a temporary but renewable modus vivendi that would have allowed Tokyo to keep its forces in place. This left Japan with the option of war with America, or an ignominious climb-down from its gains in China and Indochina. Intercepted and decoded Japanese cable traffic made Americans aware that Japan was likely to make a further move, but where and when remained cloudy. Choosing war required the conquest of oil-rich Dutch Indonesia, British-held Singapore, and additionally, so Tokyo calculated, preemptive attacks on American bases in the Philippines and as far west as Hawaii and Guam. It was a fateful decision; rationalized only by arguing that a quick removal of American naval power in the Western Pacific would allow time to stabilize a wider defense perimeter. Out of some fateful lethargy or effort not to provoke Tokyo, America's Pacific fleet was left anchored and vulnerable at its Hawaiian base.
In their different ways, the enlargement of the second world war followed from offers that could not be accepted. Certainly, the Japanese decision was irrational from a longer-term perspective. The military potential of the Americans remained far greater even if the US was sadly deficient in B-17 bombers and other weapons. The US had far greater shipyard facilities, ample oil, and a far larger industrial base. Tokyo wagered on shock and awe in the short-term. and the hope that the Americans would eventually weary of their commitment in East Asia. Instead, President Roosevelt could easily rouse the country to strike back against "a day that will live in infamy," and lead Americans to believe there could be no choice but to enter the war. That very decision impelled Hitler finally to allow his admirals to have their declaration of war so they might confront the American undeclared war in the North Atlantic.
Military historians have written about the American way of war. They refer to the sparing commitment of ground forces in favor of industrial and technological supremacy. But there is equally an American way of getting into war --not so different from that of other combatants: the protestations of innocence, the discovery that preexisting conditions compel an American response, the simultaneous efforts to negotiate and to threaten, the conviction that the other side ultimately bears the responsibility for the conflict. There is a cost. To return to the late 1930s, the Japanese government and its military behaved badly whether out of brutality or helplessness. They had already gone on a murderous rampage when they took Nanjing in 1937. They were committed to conquest, as was Hitler's Germany, which by late 1941 effectively controlled continental Europe deep into Russia and required over three years to dislodge during which it massacred millions of non-combatants, including in particular all the Jews and Roma it could lay its hands on.
Coherent American foreign policy requires cooperation between branches of government that the founders envisaged as counterweights. Our constitution stipulates the congressional right to declare war, but one may question whether the choice of war or peace has been a responsibility Congress is anxious to assume. Indeterminacy may be the best institutional balance that can be achieved. Today's critics may justifiably want Congress to control or at least take some responsibility for reining in the Trump family's ventures in diplomacy. Congressional oversight may also promise to end the "endless wars" that critics denounce, but recall that a few decades ago, concerned liberals were defending the duty to intervene where gross human rights violations were taking place.
We face some strikingly familiar dilemmas with respect to Iran. It is a far lesser power than was imperial Japan. But the possession of nuclear arms -- even if not yet by Iran itself -- introduces stakes that have transformed international politics in the period since 1945. Non-Maga politicians and pundits worry about the President’s attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, even when they would still prefer to keep enrichment below weapons capability. Are we to go to war or not? Are we prepared to escort others' vessels through the Straits of Hormuz, as we escorted supply ships to Britain halfway across the Atlantic? And if we are attacked how should we respond? Who would not prefer a Tehran regime that was more tolerant and less repressive, but who believes that this would be the consequence of a direct attack on the current Iranian government? And let us be frank, if even that development could be brought about, would those of us who believe that the Trump regime is dangerous and degrading at home be happy crediting the President with that achievement? Here we are again, confronting calculations that resist calculation -- and perhaps with the present administration apparently not even searching for whatever guidance it might find in the past, no matter how indeterminate that guidance must remain. For all our sense of fulfillment from being the "indispensable nation," would it not be best if we were less indispensable and that other coalitions weighed in as well?
Charles S. Maier
May 14, 2026