[ealgeone]

But recall we shut off the oil to Japan....as did I think did the British and Dutch.

[Zhang Fei]

[But recall we shut off the oil to Japan....as did I think did the British and Dutch.]

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The embargo occurred only after Japan moved into French Indochina. They could have backed off. Their issue wasn’t lack of oil - it was a bottomless appetite for territorial expansion. A continent’s worth of land (i.e. China) wasn’t enough for them.

They also overreached, big time. If they hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbor or the PI, there’s no way the US would have fought Japan. They could have overrun the Shell oilfields in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and there’s nothing FDR could have done about it, given that the American public wasn’t too anxious to risk a repeat of what had happened in WWI - the loss of 100,000 doughboys in 1 year of fighting.