Botched war termination in regional wars usually produces one of two outcomes: either the war protracts when the weaker belligerent launches an insurgency with economy-killing and budget-busting consequences for the counterinsurgent or the war escalates when an interested third party intervenes on the opposing side. The most common way to avoid such unpleasant eventualities is to offer peace terms generous relative to the military disposition of forces. The need to offer a generous peace is particularly important for the invading power because the value of victory is usually considerably higher for those living in theater than for those intervening from afar. This means a greater likelihood for those in theater to endure high costs and protraction. As a testament to Japan's strategy, it produced both a nationwide insurgency and multiple great-power allies for Chiang Kai-shek.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, Japan had suffered 600,000 casualties in China, a sunk cost of stupendous proportions that its leaders found difficult to justify to the Japanese people. Japan's situation was reminiscent of great powers in World War I that were equally incapable of reassessing the flawed military strategies that consumed the lives of a generation of young men. So the old men kept applying greater doses of the same tried and trashed remedies, rather than own up to their enormous failures.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 offered Japan hope in the form of a perceived window of opportunity, akin to the ones the Meiji generation had so successfully seized in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. With the fall of France in June 1940, Japan pressured Britain to close the Burma Road in July, putting Chiang Kai-shek in his worst situation since the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. German control of continental Europe promised open season in Asia for Japan to liberate by conquest the colonies that others could no longer defend. An Asia-wide empire, the Imperial Japanese Army hoped, would justify the sunk costs in China.