[simonh]

Japanese expansionism was enabled by their industrialisation, not a cause of it. Yes they wanted access to resources, but it would have been dramatically cheaper to just buy them than incur the massive costs of conquest. They expanded because they thought that's what you do to succeed, but as the post war period has shown that's just not the case and never was. Anyway the war wiped them out, there's no way any benefits of their territorial expansionism before the war carried over into the post-war period.

Look at Germany, they never had any significant empire, but they still brought rest of Europe including the imperial powers to their knees in 1940. That conflict showed that the imperial mercantilism of the previous centuries just wasn't relevant anymore.

If imperialism was so great, there's no way Germany should have conceivably been able to roll over the imperial superpowers of France and Britain. The only thing that saved the UK was the English Channel. What mattered was industrialisation, along with economic and financial liberalisation. Every country that has done well in the last 100 years, except a few resource states like those in OPEC, has done so this way.