As far back as the early 1920s (when the US finally caught on that it was becoming a “world” power, and that others might want what we had), the question of resupplying the far-flung Philippines in the event of regional war came up. With our luck, we had both neutrality issues (on the part of the PI gov’t) and the general disarmament of the era to contend with. As of the morning of December 7th, Washington still had not come up with an answer.
So true, and I’m not sure there was any plausible scenario in which we would have been ready to defend the Philippines and supply lines across the Pacific by 1941.
Without the kind of naval and air forces we had by mid-1943 we could have put more forces out to the Philippines in 1941 only to see it all destroyed by the Japanese. We were a long way from being able to defeat Japan even with any amount of re-deployment in 1941, and we would have simply lost a lot more aircraft and ships, pilots and sailors, early on.