>>105363281Japan didn’t just attack one of our territories (Hawaii wasn’t a state at the time) for shits and giggles, or even as a preliminary attempt to keep us from interfering with their ambitions in the Pacific. It was a culmination of our cutting off oil exports to Japan and our alliance with the British, who were also holding territory in the Pacific theatre.
The US wasn’t just sitting on its ass intent to stay neutral. We were involved in the conflict even before war was officially declared. We were staying out of the fighting because that was our MO at the time: wait for the conflict to work itself out and sweep in afterwards to clean up. It’s what enabled our post war manufacturing boom, because the rest of the world was in tatters where we had remained mostly untouched. To cite Pearl Harbor as the reason we entered the war ignores all the politics, alliances, and non-combative actions that were taken up to that point.