Japanese destroyers and treaty incentives

The Fubuki class shows both the quality Japan sought and the difficulty of fitting that ambition within paper limits. Its excess displacement shows how winning the treaty calculation could become more important than preserving the settlement's peaceful purpose. Japan had come out of the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War as a victor, so its political experience of conflict differed from the European trauma behind the treaty system. The United States had also forced Japan to open its ports, adding an older memory of coercion and grievance to the strategic relationship. A settlement that assumed every signatory shared the same aversion to war therefore rested on a faulty premise.