After blockading their fuel supply. Even Mario Puizzo called this out in the “God Father” Tom Hagen explains what and why, the US also knew about the Japanese attack on Perl Harbor before it happened. But it gave the US a reason to get into WWII. This is not hidden information.
I am aware of the oil blockade thing. But I’m not buying it, most of it anyway. It lets Japan off the hook. Poor Japan had to attack. No matter that they had behaved like monsters in China and in Korea many years before Pearl Harbor.
Imperial Japan was expansionistic. They wanted it all.
I also don’t believe the US government knew of the Pearl Harbor attack before it happened. Earlier in 1941 some US admirals wanted to move the Pacific fleet further back, to San Diego. That would have been done had an attack been known in advance. FDR loved the navy. No way would he have deliberately left it in Pearl Harbor as a sitting duck.
Of course, some secret paper might be released tomorrow to prove me wrong. You never know.
The situation at the time was very similar with our current situation with Russia and Ukraine.
The US was fighting a proxy war against Japan using China. Japanese expansion into China was a threat to western business interests and investments. Much of the KMT leadership and the Chinese business elite were educated in Britain and the USA. China was sort of a puppet of the US and Britain at the time, and Japan wanted to replace the Pro-western puppets with Jap puppets (in the same way that Stalin wanted to replace them with a communist puppet).
Like the current Ukraine, KMT China was extremely corrupt. A lot of war equipment supplied by the allies ended up on the black market or SOLD to the Japanese. Food, uniforms, and ammo meant for troops got sold by corrupt leadership. Funds were stolen by the leadership and laundered to overseas back accounts in the west.