how many wars are we in today?

 Though I missed it at the time -- Pearl Harbor day, in fact -- the Biden administration has sent Congress the latest in its twice yearly reports on troop deployments abroad, as required by the War Powers Resolution. It names 16 countries, the same as last time minus Afghanistan. No surprises.

using sanctions to avoid a war with Japan

 I'm always looking for good cases to illustrate the policy process. For diplomatic and military policies, the supply is vast.  For foreign economic policy, however, I haven't found many. Until this week, when I finally had a chance to read Edward S. Miller's 2007 book for the Naval Institute Press, Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor.

Miller also has a revealing summary of U.S. economic sanctions policies starting with World War I, showing how reluctant U.S. officials were to use sanctions for foreign policy purposes. The key law empowering the president for almost any economic sanctions, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act [IEEPA] of 1977, is actually based on a section of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act. That law resulted from a bureaucratic fight between the Commerce Department, which historically ran export controls, and Treasury, which claimed jurisdiction over financial transactions laws. Treasury won that fight, not least because the assertive secretary was also President Wilson's son in law.

A similar bureaucratic struggle occurred in 1940-41 over Japan.Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the key interlocutor with the Japanese, resisted harsh sanctions because he considered them too provocative. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, however, favored pressure but had only an advisory role on sanctions. In key meetings with FDR in July, 1941, the president decided on freezing Japanese assets in the United States and restricting exports of various commodities but not a full embargo. Roosevelt and his cabinet officers even expected to sell oil to Japan, but only after some delay and on a case-by-case basis.

At the sub-cabinet level, however, Dean Acheson dominated the interagency committee that wrote the rules implementing FDR's executive order and did so to prevent any oil shipments to Japan, a red line that many historians argue made war inevitable. Hull was upset to learn of the impact of the rules when he returned from medical leave, but was reluctant to force a change that might be viewed as favorable to the Japanese. FDR himself was preoccupied with his meeting with Churchill in August and the growing naval conflict with Germany and did not force a change back to his original policy.

Miller cites a 1976 paper by a researcher at the National Archives which has even more details of the hawkish cabal in the bureaucracy on the broad range of export restrictions on Japan, including redefining "aviation gas" so as to prevent any oil exports.

The key lesson for me is the power of the sub-cabinet bureaucracy to shape policy by implementation rules, regardless of presidential-level decisions. It happens all the time. The formal policy was to deter Japan from greater conquest by limited but significant export restrictions, not a full embargo. The actual policy Japan faced was an existential threat.

Revenge by a White House staffer

 I followed the career of Peter Navarro in recent years with great interest. He was an outspoken China hawk who advised the Trump campaign and then was an early appointee to work in the White House. Candidate Trump had promised to create a National Trade Council to take on China and otherwise promote an America First economic policy, but he never did. As a student of the presidency, I was not surprised that other officials blocked that action in order to preserve the established system that tilted toward mainstream policies. Instead, Navarro was named head of an Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy that had no clear authority, not even an executive order creating it, but gave Navarro a handful of aides.

Despite his weak bureaucratic position, Navarro was a hustler and he knew the president agreed with him on trade. So he wrote memos and showed up at meetings and got into fights with the more powerful figures like the secretary of the treasury and the head of the national economic council. He also maneuvered to see the president without an appointment and to ride on Air Force One, sitting in the conference room.

Navarro produced major documents criticizing China's trade policy and pushed for even tougher measures. But he repeatedly lost fights with the treasury secretary and the trade adviser, who ultimately persuaded President Trump against extreme measures.

Navarro also did valuable public service pushing the administration to recognize the danger of the coronavirus when most senior officials, including the president, were downplaying the threat. And with no clear lines of authority within the White House, Navarro wound up as the action officer for government officials and company leaders searching for protective gear and medical supplies. As he reports in his new memoir, In Trump Time, he succeeded time and time again with quick results, though he complains of many times he was thwarted by existing laws and administrative requirements.

There's a valuable case study in that memoir, though it's told in a rambling, incomplete way. Navarro tells how, in the summer of 2020, he dreamed up the idea of a special commission to investigate the causes of the pandemic and to report before election day of the human and economic costs. He believes that the virus originated in a Chinese lab and wanted to call the group the CCP Virus Commission. He wrote a draft executive order,  but then ran into resistance from several senior officials. He still can't believe that the president wouldn't agree to his brilliant election ploy.

Navarro is using his book to settle scores -- against all of Trump's national security advisers except Robert O'Brien; against Treasury Secretary Mnuchin; against Jared Kushner; against Anthony Fauci; and even against Mike Pompeo and Vice President Pence. He disparages them all in intemperate language and then describes how he thinks the Democrats stole the 2020 election and what he did to help Trump prevent a Biden inauguration. 

Navarro could have told a story of a lonely fighter for policy change. He has some victories to brag about after all. But his anger and his Trump loyalty outweigh that story.