and re: fleet “is not idle”
Even if matters had not gone so badly in the opening days the USA simply had not deployed the kinds of air and naval units in the western Pacific that had any chance of stopping Japanese advances.
Atlantic commitments plus slow re-armament meant that we had no plausible hope of keeping the Japanese out of the Philipines, Indonesia etc.
Whether or not the relevant US leaders understood this before Dec. 1941, the Japanese certainly knew it....
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.