germans losing in front of moscow in the snow, and in North Africa.
Japan about to buy in at the top by attacking the US.
You have to admit that once the US embargoed oil and avgas, war was a certainty. Been fascinated to read about that decision which essentially was about the US insistince that Japan pull out of China.
so basically we went to war with Japan over China. Of course the irony is that after the war China became a major enemy and went communist so in retrospect we didnt really accomplish the real reaosn we went to war.
We did though pull Japan into our economic sphere where it was our major partner for 50 years so that was also an unintended consequence.
Funny how no one on either side in WW2 got what they thought they would from the war.
England went to war to protect Poland from domination, but it ended up dominated and Russian.
Germany and Japan obviously had a different than planned outcome.
I gues the only real winner was the US which dominated the world from pretty much 1945 to recently.
That's a bit of a generalization but I can see where you are coming from.
It's important to realize though that China was a different animal as far as the nations involved in the Second World War are concerned.
First of all, China was the only major country in WWII that was divided into spheres of influence and had been long before this war. This really dates back to the Opium and Arrow Wars, but there had been an expansion in this leading up to the Boxer War at the beginning of the 20th century in which seven western counties (Japan, and the United States included) fought both the Boxers and the Qing's Army. The Qing, the last dynastic power in China, collapsed in 1911 and by World War I fighting in that theater was about these spheres of influence and not about any Chinese nationalistic fervor. Japan invaded Shangdong province and took Qingdao (or Tsingtao if you are a beer connoisseur) which was the German sphere of influence in China at that time. The Chinese had hoped that they would be able to win back this province at the Paris Peace Conference, but the Japanese exerted enough influence at the conference to keep the issue off the table. The Chinese protested by refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles, the only member nation at the peace conference to do so (in fact they didn't even show up at the signing ceremony). It would not be until the Washington Conference, most widely known for its naval aspects, that Japan would give Shangdong back to the fledgling Chinese government.
All the while, as these spheres of influence continued to influence Chinese politics and nationalism, the United States was still pressing for the fiction of an "Open Door" policy in China. So the Japanese expansionism in China did play a roll in the U.S. reaction to Japanese imperialism to a degree.
However, it was more an issue of the balance of power in the entire region that was a primary motivator. Notice that the embargoes of 1940 and 1941 are not related to China at all, but to Annam (French Indochina). China by this time has pretty much been reduced to skirmishing and though there are efforts being made to aid the Nationalist government, it is a drop in the bucket, and the effect is insignificant. (An interesting side note, did you know that Lend-Lease aid to China was the only Lend-Lease aid that was not provided directly to the recipient government instead being controlled by the American aid in theater, like General Joe Stilwell).
Indochina however, creates a whole new problem with the balance of power in the South Pacific. Now we have Japanese expansionism directly threatening Western colonial possessions. The Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines are all now in the line of fire of the Japanese. This was a larger issue than that of the Nationalist's struggle for control in China (meanwhile the CCP is slowly growing in the north to become a problem for the Nationalists down the road). While the official American position is one of anti-colonialism, these areas, especially the DEI are still trading partners and as Alfred Mahan would say, these lines of communication must be maintained.