Retrospective analysis of the book has discussed it in terms of negative U.S. attitudes towards Japan or other countries in general that challenge the U.S. economically.

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.

Fic found the book "deserv[ed] respect for its courage and candour" but also that "Friedman and LeBard's prognostication about war is built upon a series of assumptions that are more like loose pebbles than solid bedrock".

[20] The Economist's July 1991 review called the authors "alarmist" and accused them of "sensationalism", before expressing the view that US-Japan relations were much more intimate and complex than Friedman and LeBard had accounted for.

[21] Haruo Shimada, a professor of economics at Keio University described the book as "very dangerous, because Americans who aren't well informed may believe it".

[6] Jeff Kingston writing in the Japan Times accused the authors of "fanciful assumptions and simplified analysis", and stated that accepting the predictions of the book meant accepting "an implausible chain of events", and that for the Japanese to build a regional bloc as predicted in the book they would have to avoid being regarded as a threat.

[13] Jeb Stewart, an analyst at the US Army Engineer School, was less positive about the book in his review of it in the November 1992 issue of Engineer, describing it as "contain[ing] some flaws in logic", particularly because of what he saw as its failure to fully account for the role of relations between China and Japan, and the large investment in ballistic missile defences that Stewart believed Japan would need in such a conflict.

[26] In March 1994 Friedman and LeBard wrote that the end of the Japanese boom, the formation of NAFTA, and what they characterised as the collapse of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party showed that their predictions were coming true, and warned that the US would soon stop tolerating the US trade deficit with Japan and that this would "set the stage for the next act, which will go far beyond the conflicts of trade".

[27] Friedman and LeBard, who are married,[28] went on to write The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century and The Intelligence Edge: How to Profit in the Information Age together.

[32] Retrospective analysis of the book has discussed it in the light of the "Japan bashing" of the era in which it was written, and anti-Asian sentiment in the US more generally, and ranked it with other "revisionist" texts.

[16] In the 2005 book The Columbia Guide to Asian American History, Gary Y. Okihiro described the book, together with The Coming Conflict with China, as being based on the assumption that "Japan and China maintain deep-seated and persistent views of the United States as their rival and enemy, grounded in economic and political competition, but also in a Clash of Civilizations", though Okihiro also noted that Friedman and LeBard disclaimed the title of "Japan Bashing".