9. It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado; and it is barely possible that vigorous action on our part might lead the Japanese to modify their attitude. Therefore, the following course of action is suggested:

   A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
   B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
   C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek.
   D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
   E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
   F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
   G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
   H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

10. If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war.

(Emphasis added)

While this web page provides an exceedingly basic explanation, and it seems that the author was under the (mistaken) impression that the Presidency’s war against the Axis was motivated by altruism, it was nevertheless my first exposure to the chilling truth that Washington was partially responsible for this infamous assault. The Empire of Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor may at first look like a gamble, but it would be more accurate to describe it an the inevitable consequence of Washington’s geoeconomic policy. Quoting David Swanson’s Leaving World War II Behind, chapter 11:

The Asia pivot of the Obama–Trump era had a precedent in the years leading up to WWII, as the United States and Japan built up their military presence in the Pacific. The United States was aiding China in the war against Japan and blockading Japan to deprive it of critical resources prior to Japan’s attack on U.S. troops and imperial territories.

The militarism of the United States does not free Japan of responsibility for its own militarism, or vice versa, but the myth of the innocent bystander shockingly assaulted out of the blue is no more real than the myth of the war to save the Jews.

[…]

The U.S. Navy developed its plans for a war on Japan. The March 8, 1939, version of these plans described “an offensive war of long duration” that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of Japan.

The U.S. military even planned for a Japanese attack on Hawaii, which it thought might begin with conquering the island of Ni’ihau, from which flights would take off to assault the other islands. U.S. Army Air Corp. Lt. Col. Gerald Brant approached the islands. U.S. Army Air Corp. Lt. Col. Gerald Brant approached the Robinson family, which owned Ni’ihau and still does. He asked them to plow furrows across the island in a grid, to render it useless for airplanes.

Between 1933 and 1937, three Ni’ihau men cut the furrows with plows pulled by mules or draft horses. As it turned out, the Japanese had no plans to use Ni’ihau, but when a Japanese plane that had just been part of the attack on Pearl Harbor had to make an emergency landing, it landed on Ni’ihau despite all the efforts of the mules and horses. […] In 1939–1940, the U.S. Navy built new Pacific bases in Midway, Johnston, Palmyra, Wake, Guam, Samoa, and Hawaii.²⁷²

[…]

On October 7, 1940, the director of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence Far East Asia Section Arthur McCollum wrote a memo.²⁷³ He worried about possible future Axis threats to the British fleet, to the British Empire, and to the Allies’ ability to blockade Europe. He speculated about a theoretical future Axis attack on the United States. […] On February 5, 1941, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson to warn of the possibility of a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Swanson goes on for several more pages supplying evidence that U.S. officials contemplated warfare with their Japanese competitors since at least 1934 (three years after the invasion of Manchuria), but what you need to know above all is that it was the Allies deliberately withholding resources from the Empire of Japan in 1941 that provoked the Axis assault on Pearl Harbor and then the Philippines. For Tōkyō, that was the last straw:

On July 24, 1941, President Roosevelt remarked, “If we cut the oil off, [the Japanese] probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had a war. It was very essential from our own selfish point of view of defense to prevent a war from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from breaking out there.”²⁸² Reporters noticed that Roosevelt said “was” rather than “is.”

The next day, Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing Japanese assets. The United States and Britain cut off oil and scrap metal to Japan. Radhabinod Pal, an Indian jurist who served on the war crimes tribunal after the war, found the embargoes a predictably provocative threat to Japan.²⁸³ […] By September 1941 the Japanese press was outraged that the United States had begun shipping oil right past Japan to reach Russia. Japan, its newspapers said, was dying a slow death from “economic war.”

(Emphasis added in all casess.)

Similarly to the Axis, Imperial America’s main motive for waging war was, as usual, monopolizing resources, but it is almost certain that another reason was reinforcing bourgeois rule in Eurasia, ensuring that as few states as possible would fall into proletarian hands as the Axis suffered defeat.

In other words, the Western Allies wanted to beat us to the punch. After all, most West Germans were in favor of transferring large industries to the public sector, we almost seized power in Italy, and bombed out Tōkyō saw a ‘sea of Red Flags’ in 1945, so Anglo‐American capital had to take the wheel before the Axis crashed the bus.