A Very Big Mistake

[Gilroy]

Which has nothing to do with Japanese aggression preceeding WW2. America was at war with Spain after Spain attacked 40 years previous. Let's compare apples with apples,shall we?

Well brother the Americans had no problem supplying OIL, AIRPLANES AND ENGINES while the Japanese expanded their territory preceding WW2 ? When it no longer suited them, the Americans cut of the supply, which seemed to force the Japanese to attack.

With a dwindling supply of petroleum, Japan faced the appalling prospect of having to give up its ambitions for a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’. In reaction to the US’s financial freeze and de facto oil embargo, on 3 September 1941, Prime Minister Konoe’s cabinet convened to discuss the ‘Outline Plan for the Execution of the Empire’s National Policy’, produced by Imperial General Headquarters, a council of top-ranking army and navy officers. Unless the western powers backed down, the cabinet resolved “… to go to war with the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands if necessary”.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/...g-conflict-us/

The Japanese military was obsessed with oil. Its strategists had carefully studied the lessons of World War I, in which oil and the internal combustion engine had proved of decisive importance. The Japanese military machine was almost entirely dependent upon imported oil -- and that meant the United States, which supplied about 80 percent of Japan's supplies in those days. (Much of the rest came from the Dutch East Indies -- now Indonesia.)

As Japan pursued its war against China, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, pushed by outraged public opinion, embargoed the export to Japan of various goods of military value, beginning with a "moral embargo" against the sale of airplanes and engines, then extended to an actual prohibition against the export of iron and scrap metal and aviation gasoline of 87 octane and higher.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-baf67d3a9db8/