5 Last Chance of an Opportune War: Preempting Woodrow Wilson in Asia Away, then, with the alien and repulsive slogan, "democratic!" Never will the mechanical-democratic state of the West be naturalized with us. -Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1918 The American president's propagation of democracy throughout the world in the wake of military victory has given a strong push [to parliamentary gov­ ernment and universal suffrage] .... For better or for worse, we are truly up against a time of crisis. -Mori Ogai, 1918 The principal belligerents entered the third year of war in the fall of 1916 reinvigorated for battle. The heroes of Germany's eastern campaign, General Paul von Hindenburg and Major General Erich Ludendorff, be­ came in August the chief of the German General Staff and quartermaster general, respectively, and refused to accommodate Russia by renouncing German gains in Poland. In France, General Robert Nivelle, architect of recent spectacular advances at Verdun, assumed the role of supreme commander on the Western front in November and announced that "victory is certain."1 In London, the Liberal Party's David Lloyd George, who had called in parliament for a "knock-out blow" against the Ger­ mans, in December formed a "national unity" cabinet and promised to prosecute the war with vigor. LAST CHANCE OF AN OPPORTUNE WAR 155 While the French and British thus focused on crushing the German menace, their Japanese allies had turned their attention to a very different challenge. That challenge was graphically described in the title of a spe­ cial three-part series in the monthly Chuo koron beginning October 1916: "A Study of America, Which Is Extending Its Expansionary Wings over the Pacific and East Asian Continent." Japan's most prominent intellec­ tuals, businessmen, and soldiers gathered in the fall of 1916 for a forum not on how to defeat Germany in the present but on how to confront the United States in the future. Like Japan, Kyoto University professor Sue­ biro Shigeo explained, the United States had not only avoided the de­ struction of the war but had actually benefited economically.2 If the con­ flict had dramatically raised Japanese national power and international authority, it promised to do the same for the United States. What did a boost to American international authority mean for Japan's future? Waseda University professor Oyama Ikuo clung to the desperate hope that the United States would "remain forever the peace­ maker of the world."3 But Suehiro was less sanguine. "Will not Japanese­ American relations," he wondered, "become in the future, in a certain sense, similar to British-German relations before the war?"4 Representa­ tives of Japan's two services described the rapid wartime growth of America's army and navy and demanded an equivalent augmentation of Japan's armed forces. 5 And the champion of Japanese democracy, Yo­ shino Sakuzo, noted the high probability of American expansion in China and the likelihood that this would lead to conflict with other pow­ ers with a stake on the continent.6 The tension between Japanese and American wartime goals would, indeed, become increasingly marked under the cabinet of General T erau­ chi Masatake. The cabinet would emerge in September 1916, after all, as the Yamagata faction's antidote to the movement for "constitutional gov­ ernment." And under T erauchi, the faction's bid for an autonomous Japanese diplomacy would reach its fullest fruition. The United States, on the other hand, would enter the war in April 1917 in a bid to make the world "safe for democracy." It would, as well, offer international coop­ eration over the balance of power as the primary object of international affairs. .