Friedman and LeBard argue in the book that, with the USSR in a state of collapse and with the Cold War coming to a close at the time, the United States was more likely to come into conflict with Japan as the US no longer had sufficient reason to tolerate what the authors believed to be Japanese economic encroachment. Friedman and LeBard predicted that a series of trade wars between the US and Japan would lead to a final rupture between the two countries. The authors also expressed the view that, as with Imperial Japan in the 1930s and 40s, Japan would seek to take control of sources of raw materials and force the US out of the western Pacific. The authors saw the only alternative to a hot war between the US and Japan as being a "long, miserable cold war".