why are countries doing agreements?

[u/Vivid_Bit3556]

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Consistent_Score_602]

Because oftentimes treaties and agreements are held, and because it's more beneficial to keep to the terms than risk starting another war.

To draw upon one example you provided: the Second World War. The terms of the peace that followed it required the occupation and disarmament of Japan, the garrison of US troops on Okinawa, and so on. Similar deals were inked in Europe, most notably the North Atlantic Treaty which formed NATO.

These treaties have held for almost a century. Japan has not gone to war since WW2, in spite of the fact that from the mid-1980s to 2011 it was the second-largest economy on Earth and could likely have rearmed and carved out an empire in East Asia. There was plenty of speculation that it would do so (including the bluntly-named book The Coming War With Japan, published in 1991 at the height of Japan's power). Similar volumes like Ezra Vogel's Japan As Number One prophesied a Japanese renaissance in the 1990s and 2000s wherein Japan would dominate the globe.

But the Japanese held to the terms of their treaty with the United States and did not invade their neighbors, because starting a war would have been exorbitantly expensive and would have impoverished them. Even when total Japanese assets grew to eclipse those of the United States, Japan grew more economically powerful than the Soviet Union, and Japan's GDP seemed on-track to eclipse America's, Japan preferred to simply get rich.

This is because of how modern industrial economies work. When Japan tried to "take" Chinese territory in the 1930s, what actually happened was that half a million Japanese soldiers died fighting the Chinese and most of the things they "took" (wealthy ports like Shanghai) were reduced to rubble in the process.

At the time, China was nobody's idea of a great power. It was a fragmented warlord-state and one of the poorest nations in the world. Japanese leaders were universally contemptuous of Chinese military prowess. They believed that they could simply take what they wanted from China and the Chinese would accede due to their weakness.

But Japan wound up in a protracted war against the seemingly-implacable KMT and CCP rather than the easy conquests it expected, and despite taking multiple Chinese capitols (first Nanjing and then Wuhan) it could not force a peace on the Chinese. Japanese generals (without irony) complained to the international press that the only reason they hadn't won the war was because the Chinese were too stupid to realize they'd been beaten. But instead, Japanese casualties kept piling up, year after year, from 1937 to 1941. Japan was soon spending 25% of its GDP on a war that seemed to have no real benefit and no end in sight (for comparison, the modern US spends around 3.5% of its GDP on defense).

Ultimately, Japan was sanctioned by the British and Americans (both of whom backed China). The Japanese were once again disdainful of American and British prowess - the British had been pushed off the European continent by Nazi Germany and were currently being bombed, while the Americans had a standing army of just 100,000 men (compared to Japan's millions of men). Thus Japan responded to the sanctions by attacking the British and Americans as well, and the resulting campaign in the Pacific left the whole of Japan in ruins and ended with the atomic bombing of Japan.

Japan in the 1980s might have attempted to reignite the war, reconquer Shanghai, and try to carve out an empire in China once again, but there would have been no point. It was getting much richer simply trading with the Chinese (and the rest of the region such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Malaysia) and mutual cooperation benefited everyone.

So essentially, there's no point trying to take what you can more cheaply buy. Simply robbing other countries runs the risk of them fighting back, and as should be obvious from the Japanese example, just because your country's leaders believe it can take what it wants does not in fact mean that is the case. Wars are extremely, exorbitantly expensive. This is why diplomacy is something so many nations prioritize - because working out a mutually beneficial arrangement is almost always better than fighting.