While the convention in the West is to see the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 as the beginning of the Second World War, the war in Asia actually began much earlier with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In 1937 Japan redoubled its efforts in East Asia, pushing into China and capturing Shanghai and Nanking. Extreme violence perpetrated by the Japanese conquerors of Nanking subsequently turned much of the world against the expansionist Japanese regime, while on the ground resurgent nationalist Chinese forces managed to slow the Japanese advance.
During its early expansion, the Japanese military was highly dependent on oil imports, much of which came from the United States which was then the largest oil producer in the world. As a consequence of Japanese militarism and the atrocities associated with the war in China the United States, along with Britain and the Netherlands, issued restrictions on the sale of oil and steel to Japan in late 1940. To make up for this shortfall in oil imports, the Japanese military began planning a possible war with the United States so that it could seize the oil fields of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.
Tensions between Japan and the United States heightened in the fall of 1941. After Japan occupied parts of Indochina in July of that year the U.S. had frozen Japanese assets, and in August it instituted a complete embargo of oil exports to Japan. The two powers made a final attempt to resolve their differences in November 1941, when Japan offered to abandon Indochina if the U.S. reopened the oil spigot. Secretary of State Cordell Hull responded on November 26 with a demand for the unconditional withdrawal of Japan from East Asia.
This cartoon, published on November 28, 1941 just over a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, is Geisel’s take on the final negotiations between the United States and Japan before the war began. He presents the negotiations as a Japanese maneuver to prepare for war with the United States. The brick demanded by the pie-wielding Japanese figure represents American oil, and the cartoon is suggesting that Japan wanted to use that oil to attack the United States itself. The cartoon further implies that Japan would attack the United States regardless of the outcome of the negotiations, but that if it was denied oil it will attack from a weakened position.