In December 1938, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, then Premier of Japan, made a famous speech in which he proclaimed that Japan's aim was the creation of a New Order in East Asia. Ostensibly this meant that the Orient should be for Orientals, working in cooperation with each other; actually, it developed, it was to mean an Orient for the enjoyment of Japan. Recently, after a year and a half's retirement, Prince Konoye returned to power at the head of a quasi-fascist Government. Like a poor but ambitious woman who cocks a new feather on an old hat, his new Government revised his threadbare slogan to read: New Order in Greater East Asia.
The tacitly understood boundaries of Greater East Asia include Japan, Manchukuo, Inner Mongolia, China, French Indo-China, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, The Netherlands East Indies. The next step, about which many young Japanese speak frankly, is to delete the word East: establish Japanese hegemony over Greater Asia, meaning the Philippines, Burma, India, Australia. The strategic problem of attaining the first of these objectives appears on the map which occupies the following two pages.
The military defeats of France and The Netherlands and the desperate extremity of Great Britain have recently caused Japan's amateur imperialists to clamor for, and her professionals to prepare for, an adventure toward the equator. If the Japanese were to accomplish their much-vaunted New Order in this area, U. S. economy might be severely dislocated. Materials for a range of products all the way from tires to electric-light filaments, from tea to teak, from tin for canning to quinine for malaria, would become drastically scarce in the U. S. until substitutes could be produced in sufficient quantities. What the U. S. can do about it is limited by the fact that the East Indies lie some 2,000 miles outside the arc of effective U. S. operations. Furthermore, if the U. S. at this juncture tried to press home the recent halfhearted embargo on scrap iron, steel and oil, doing so would probably drive Japan to desperate measures in the Indies, where she could get an alternate supply of oil and some iron.