(01-16-2018 06:45 PM)Love and Honor Wrote:  

(01-16-2018 08:41 AM)miko33 Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 05:24 PM)Love and Honor Wrote:  I tend to agree with this sentiment. While imo FDR may have underestimated Stalin and didn't anticipate the scale of what the Cold War would become after his death, I think he and many within the government were aware of the threat Nazi Germany posed if left free to their own devices. Had they been allowed to continue unopposed and win the war you may have seen an alternate Iron Curtain of fascism emerge out of Europe and East Asia that would've been diametrically opposed to American values (especially given that the Holocaust wasn't going to remain a secret forever), and in that we would've had no choice but to fight unless we wanted to see the domino theory play out.

While I'm not a believer of the 'FDR knew about Pearl Harbor' theory, he had to have known that the oil embargo was going to have repercussions that were likely to hit the US and given us cause to enter. Hell, the US has gone to war over a lot less, something like the sinking of the USS Maine or the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was enough to incite wars under far less tense circumstances.

Regardless of what Hitler did, the U.S. was going to be dragged into WW2 because of the Japanese. In particular with the Japanese, I'm surprised that they chose to go after the U.S. as opposed to focusing more on Russia and the vast natural resources there. I don't know enough about the petroleum industry in the USSR during the 30s into the 40s, so perhaps the issue was that their energy supply was grossly underdeveloped compared to the U.S. and that was why Japan took the gambit of attacking the U.S. the USSR is right on their doorstep, and the red army was pretty weak when Hitler invaded.

At the end of the day FDR and the higher-ups knew that Hitler in Europe was the bigger fish to fry. Japanese actions made it convenient for us to enter, but had they managed not to directly provoke us at some point point we would've gotten involved imo. Even if there was quite a bit of isolationist sentiment present within the population and Congress at the time, FDR would've had enough political clout to eventually push us into the war under similar justification as Wilson's "make the world safe for democracy" argument, combined with an appeal to humanitarian morality against a genocidal regime. The Selective Service Act was signed into law over a year before Pearl Harbor after all, and primarily in response to the fall of France.

If Japan's Army hadn't stalled out on the Asian mainland, the Empire never would have had to turn west to meet their raw material needs.