Decisive battle, democracy, and negotiated peace

Decisive battle sat within a political culture that expected a major fight to be followed by negotiation, with the victor shaping the peace. That expectation could encourage Japanese military leaders to mistake democratic political conflict for weakness and assume that voters would reject a long war after a sharp defeat. States such as Britain and the United States did not necessarily treat one lost battle as a reason to concede. A military government could therefore read an opponent's public argument and electoral politics through its own hierarchical assumptions. National will, rather than fleet losses alone, was a central weakness in the doctrine.