The Japanese were fighting a two front war. I believe that the Allied forces outnumbered their Japanese attackers.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been more depressed about my country than after I read the original article. It makes sense. The Soviets played FDR.
We knew the Germans didn’t have any aircraft carriers. We knew the Japanese did. The Germans couldn’t attack North America. The Japanese could. The logical choice would be to defeat Japan first. We didn’t. We were played by the friendly Soviets. God, I despise the Democrats even more.
I don’t think the Soviets had as much to do with it as Churchill.
And Churchill had less to do with it than Roosevelt and Marshall.
Looking at the whole business dispassionately, from the point of view of global strategy and US national strategy, it made sense to consider the Germans the primary enemy. The US economy was far more closely tied to Europe than East Asia. Japan was powerful, but had far less economic potential than a victorious Germany. Any potential losses to Japan were, in terms of US interests, very minor. The Philippines was seen by most in Washington as much more a liability than an asset; the US government had been trying to get rid of it for two decades (an interesting point being that Philippine “nationalists” cleverly played the Washington game to keep the Americans in while loudly proclaiming a desire for independence. Quezon was very tricky).
Roosevelt kept most of his analysis very close to his chest. Most US grand strategy deliberations were never documented and even at this time are quite murky. But its clear that Roosevelt wanted a pretext to go to war, with someone, in order to justify mobilization. There were any number of deliberate provocations of the Germans and the Japanese, that must have come straight from the top.