Nations, like men, learn most from the wounds they survive. Japan learned twice. The first lesson nearly destroyed it. The second rebuilt it. Iraq has yet to learn either. Whether it still has time to internalize the hard lesson is the question this moment forces us to ask.

The black ships and the first lesson

On 8 July 1853, four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry entered Uraga harbor. They trained their guns on the town. Perry refused Japanese demands that he sail on to Nagasaki, the only port then open to foreigners. He did not fire. He did not need to. The threat alone was enough. The Tokugawa shogunate, having watched China humiliated in the Opium War a decade earlier, understood the arithmetic: resistance meant destruction, compliance bought time. Chief Councilor Abe Masahiro accepted Fillmore’s letter rather than test Perry’s guns, then quietly began preparing Japan’s defenses.

Japan was not conquered in 1853. It was persuaded, by the sight of overwhelming force, that persuasion was cheaper than war. That encounter seeded the Meiji Restoration fifteen years later, and with it a national obsession: science was now supreme. For the next half-century, Japan sent its brightest abroad: to Berlin for medicine, London for naval engineering, and Paris for law. It built universities, shipyards, and, methodically, a modern navy.

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Tsushima, and the wrong lesson

The navy delivered its verdict at the Tsushima Strait on 27th – 28th May 1905. Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō’s fleet annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet in roughly a day. Russia lost twenty-one ships sunk and seven captured; Japan lost three torpedo boats. A contemporary British observer called it by far the greatest naval event since Trafalgar. An Asian power had, for the first time in the modern era, destroyed a European one at sea.

Here the story bends. The victory that should have........

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