A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY: Pearl Harbor 80 years on.

…Pearl Harbor was more of a culmination than a surprise.

In the late summer of 1945, historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager reflected on the WWII’s origins. In a short article published in November 1945, they wrote, “The explanation (for WWII) was to be found in the breakdown in the system of collective security and the growth of international anarchy, moral and political, in the post-war years.” Post-war meant post-WWI, the war to end all wars.

Collective insecurity sounds so academic, and so I’ll translate: The more sober and more good failed to stand up to the fanatics.

Did Pearl Harbor start WWII? No. Let’s go to Mukden (Shenyang), China, Sept. 19, 1931, when Japanese soldiers attacked the Chinese Mukden garrison and invaded Manchuria.

There’s a very good case Mukden is the surprise attack that started WWII.

The Mukden attack was what current observers call “an emerging threat.” Emerging? It was a threat that Washington could ignore. So was the Nanking Massacre, commonly called the Rape of Nanking, an imperial Japanese mass atrocity committed against the Chinese in 1937.

Dead history? No, instructive history. In 2021 America and its allies — including a democratic Japan — face emerging threats that are, frankly, deadly threats thrust in our collective face.

Check it out.