Author Edward Miller contends here that the United States forced Japan into international bankruptcy to deter its aggression. Washington experts confidently predicted that the war in China would bankrupt Japan, unaware that the Japanese government had a huge cache of dollars fraudulently hidden in New York. Once discovered, Japan scrambled to extract the money. But in July 1941 President Roosevelt invoked a long-forgotten clause of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to freeze Japan's dollars.
Miller's research of newly declassified Treasury and Federal Reserve records and analysis of a massive OSS-State Department study of prewar Japan demonstrates that the deprivations facing Japan buttressed its choice of war at Pearl Harbor.

Edward S. Miller served as chief financial officer of a major international mining corporation and the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corporation. His first book, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1941, won five distinguished history book awards.