Hindsight and Foresight
In the Future of War, Lawrence Freedman, comments how utterly unprepared and surprised the US and USSR were just before Pearl Harbor and the start of Operation Barbarossa due to
Moscow and Washington [having] miscalculated in their assessments of the risks they faced because they did not appreciate that others might miscalculate so badly in the risks they were prepared to take.
The Japanese, even emboldened by their recent success pulling off a surprise attack on the Russian Far East fleet during the first Sino-Japanese war, knew perfectly well there could be no military defeat of the United States. The attack on Pearl Harbor was hatched in the hopes that the US would cut their losses and come back to the negotiating table after a surprising, swift and devastating attack. No invasion or occupation of the continental United States was contemplated.
Hitler established a cynical but fruitful partnership with Stalin and was fighting a resource intensive war with Britain. Against the advice of his generals, he decreed that "the German Wehrmacht must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign even before the end of the war against England." Despite England being stuck in defensive mode, opening a second front to the east risked overextending the Nazi forces. If the blitzkrieg didn't work, Nazi soldiers would have to face the harsh soviet winter without appropriate equipment.
Miscalculations also abounded in 1962 when First Secretary Khrushchev decided to move medium-range nuclear missiles into Cuba in an attempt to level the nuclear playing field. As Kenneth Michael Absher recalls in Mind-Sets and Missiles, he did this despite being told by his First Deputy Prime Minister that
He doubted the operation could be kept secret, he doubted that Castro would agree, and he doubted that the Americans would accept the missiles.
And by his Foreign Minister that
Putting missiles into Cuba would cause a political explosion in the United States. I am absolutely certain of that, and this should be taken into account.
Such was the grip of the supremacy of communist ideology on his mind, supported by his perceived weakness of Kennedy, that he ignored two of his top ministers and brought the world as close to nuclear war as it has ever been.
The key here is that the decisions to become belligerent are not coming from a place of logic and reason. Once again, in the words of Lawrence Freedman
For the Nazis in Germany and militarists in Japan, total war was not so much a matter of strategy as of world-view.
These conflicts were as if fated to be hashed out – or almost hashed out – violently, because each side did not fit into the other's world-view. The USSR was in the way of Nazi Germany's Lebensraum and its ideological antagonist. The US stood in the way of Japan's dominion over China. Eventually, it also became a threat to "Soviet prestige" and Marxism-Leninism.
References:
- The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman
- Mind-Sets and Missiles: A First Handle Account of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Kenneth Michael Absher
- Cuba and Pearl Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight by Roberta Wohlstetter