>>18716
Like every other aspect of US military and foreign policy between 1933 and around 1946, it was done to please Stalin, who loved him some show trials. Never forget that this was just after half a million working-class White American men were enslaved by their own government and sent to their deaths to prop up Josef Stalin and install Mao T'se-Tung and Ho Chi Minh.
I don't know whether US entry into the war could have been prevented, realistically. Japanese territorial ambitions in the Far East specifically and explicitly included the Philippines, then US territory. Some will claim that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the direct and predictable result of eight consecutive years of calculated provocations, denunciations, and ultimatums from the Rosenfelt Administration. There is truth in this. FDR was desperate for a war and worked very hard to bring about conditions for US participation in the war that the whole world saw coming years before the fact, preferably on the side of ((( the Tribe ))). But even if the US had not gotten a Red regime eager for a nice long expensive bloody war to get rid of working-class males who were surplus to requirements and give peasantry foreign enemies to talk about as a distraction from their own government's corruption and ineptitude, the Japanese plans for a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere were real and went back to the 19th Century. The Russian Revolution and subsequent Russian invasions of multiple neighboring states gave the Japanese a motivation of very justified fear that pointed in the same direction as their existing culture of ultranationalism and militarism that lusted for Asia's cheap minerals and petroleum and cheaper labor, giving them a sense of urgency.
Let us say, speaking for the sake of argument, that during the 1930s the US government had successive Republican administrations pursuing a foreign policy of strict neutrality. In 1937 when the Japanese invade China the US response is a sternly worded letter, but not two, and not a buildup of troops in the Philippines. When 1939 comes around and the Japanese are treaty-bound to declare war on and attack the territories of the UK, France, and the Netherlands, they have to have the Philippines too. They can't leave that territory in any other hands, no matter how conciliatory a Willkie administration might be. It's part of the plan. The copra and coconut oil and abaca aren't economically especially valuable or interesting, but a population of almost twenty million people not performing labor for the Japanese war machine, on islands more than large enough for multiple large military bases, on their very doorstep, that was something they could not have left on the table.
But maybe if by then the US government hadn't spent nearly a decade in continuous escalating denunciations of the NatSoc government in Germany and its leaders, maybe without FDR waging economic warfare and carrying out every calculated provocation he and Cordell Hull could think of, some of which violated US law, maybe Hitler, getting up that Monday morning, hearing the news about the attack on the Philippines by his erstwhile allies, might not have instantly declared war. Maybe the years of 1940-1945 would have been remembered as the years of the US-Japanese War, in which the US did not open multiple European fronts and did not send thousands of Merchant Marine sailors to their deaths delivering food, fuel, and ammunition to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in order to keep Stalin's "experiment in social democracy" afloat. Maybe the US would not have declared war on Germany or Italy, and there would have been no chest-beating demands for German "unconditional surrender." Maybe without US aid Churchill would have been forced to make terms with the Germans and let the Germans save Europe from Bolshevism. Maybe? I'm not a historian, I don't play one on TV, and I didn't sleep at a Holiday Inn last night either.