This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Baxter, and I welcome Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover

Institution, historian, Victor Davis Hanson, a classist historian, but also writing the

Second World War some years past, a book where Victor very carefully took us through the

revisionism of the Second World War and whatever happened to the results of the war, the adversaries,

the Allies, their emissions and their ambitions. We go to one particular adversary who

here in the 21st century is regarded as a great ally of the United States, talking about the

Japan, then the Imperial Japanese Empire. Victor, what is instructive here is how similar

some of the big talk in Tokyo in 1931 resembles the big talk in Beijing in 2021. So there we

have it, 80 years coming to the same theme. What was the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere

and how did it work? Good evening to you Victor. Good evening. It was dreamed up in 1938,

1939 and then put in to ad hoc process and then formally declared late 1941, 40, 41. And what

it was is Japan said that all these Asian countries on its perimeter and in the Pacific had

suffered from European colonialism and they would integrate their economies and their natural

resources to feed the Japanese industrial tighten and then in exchange Japan would create

a peaceful sphere of Asian co-prosperity. And it was predicated realistically on the fact

that after Hitler had overrun Western Europe, Japan looked around its perimeter and said,

you know what, there is no more Holland, the Netherlands ceased to exist so the Dutch East

and East and the Shell oil fields should be ours. And then they looked at Southeast Asia in 1940

and said, you know what, France ceased to exist in late June of 1940. So all that red,

red, red basket in Cambodia and Vietnam except for it's right for the taking. And then they said,

Britain is isolated and Malaysia with its rubber and its oil and Singapore will be easy to

pluck and then they made the catastrophic further correlation that the United States, while not a

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