The lesson of time: What Iraq might learn from Japan’s two devastating experiences

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 taught Japan discipline instead taught it the intoxication of power. The military, flush with prestige, saw conquest as vindication rather than risk.

Japan invaded Manchuria, then China, then, in December 1941, struck Pearl Harbor. It mistook one victory for a verdict on its destiny. Hubris arrives dressed as confidence.

Hiroshima, and the second lesson

The reckoning came on August 6 and 9, 1945. Two cities, two bombs, and an empire that had out-fought a European power four decades earlier now lay in ruins, occupied, disarmed. This time the lesson took.

Japan drew a different conclusion: power has limits, military glory bankrupts its holder, and national strength is better built in factories than fleets.

It rebuilt itself as an economic power rather than a martial one and, within a generation, held the world’s second-largest economy, without an army capable of projecting force abroad.

Iraq’s first chance

Move now to Mesopotamia. British forces entered Baghdad in 1917, and the mandate that followed did what mandates rarely do: it built. Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s saw rapid development in irrigation, oil infrastructure, education, and agriculture under Nuri al-Said, prime minister fourteen times between 1930 and 1958, a shrewd if flawed operator who understood that development, not confrontation, was the surer route to sovereignty.

It did not last. On 14th July 1958, Abd al-Karim Qasim’s coup ended the monarchy. King Faisal II was killed; Nuri al-Said was killed the next day, his body dragged through Baghdad’s streets. What followed was not a second lesson but a descent: coup after coup, a war with Iran that cost perhaps half a million Iraqi lives, the annexation of Kuwait in 1990, and finally the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and opened twenty-three years of sectarian fracture, at times under near-direct Iranian tutelage over Iraqi state institutions.

Bide your time

There is a phrase in Chinese statecraft, tāoguāng yǎnghuì: hide your strength, bide your time. It is associated with Deng Xiaoping’s guidance to Chinese leaders in the early 1990s, after the Tiananmen Square protests and the Soviet collapse left China isolated. Deng earned the right to counsel patience the hard way, purged twice, and sent during the Cultural Revolution to a labor camp in Jiangxi. His advice was not passivity but strategic restraint: the discipline to build strength quietly rather than announce it prematurely.

Japan learned this only after Hiroshima, at a cost no nation should have to pay to learn anything—one wonders whether Iraq has learned it at all. Iraqi political life since 1958 has run almost in the inverse of Deng’s advice: strength announced before it existed, war chosen when patience was available. Qasim’s nationalism, Saddam’s wars, and the militias’ post-2003 scramble for power were each a failure to bide time.

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The present test

Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi landed in Washington this week, his first foreign trip since forming a government in May. He arrived with a delegation of business leaders and an agenda built around American investment in energy and infrastructure, and a promise that weapons in Iraq would belong to the state alone. Baghdad has tied that promise to a hard deadline: 30th September, when the US-led coalition’s remaining presence in Kurdistan is set to end.

The reception at home shows how contested this is.

Hours before al-Zaidi’s plane left Baghdad, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella of Iran-aligned factions, rejected the visit outright, warning against replacing military occupation with what it called an even more dangerous economic occupation.

One Baghdad University professor put it starkly: al-Zaidi must align with Washington or move closer to Tehran; there is little room to maneuver.

That is a test Japan never faced in quite this form. Japan’s second lesson worked because the Japanese themselves internalized it; no occupying power could have imposed the decision to build Sony and Toyota rather than battleships.

Al-Zaidi’s dilemma is harder: he must choose civilian reconstruction over militarism, while a domestic armed constituency, backed by a neighboring state, insists that disarmament itself is the trap.

If Iraq is to draw its own version of Japan’s second lesson, it will not come from a foreign patron dismantling militias on its behalf. It will come only when Iraqis themselves conclude, as postwar Japan did, that peace, education, and quiet construction outperform militarism, and that good relations with neighbors cost less than perpetual confrontation. Al-Zaidi’s 30th September deadline is the first real test of whether that conclusion has taken root, or remains, as it has since 1958, imposed from outside and resisted within. Japan needed a mushroom cloud to learn that lesson. The hope for Iraq is that it might learn it without one.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.