It is not clear to me that the US would have intervened had Japan attacked the Dutch East Indies or even Australia. If this is true and Japan had thought it likely that the US would not intervene, I think US paticipation could have been avoided.
I’d say the US, Germany and Japan all chose to fight.
All chose to fight contingent on certain actions of others, but the same is true of Ghandi “I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence,” and basically every other entity. Each just had different conditions of others before it came to that action from them.
For Germany, if adjacent countries had certain territory and did not surrender it, they would invade. For Japan, they would rather not invade the Allies in the East, but would if the US cut off oil. For the US, if Japan waged sufficient amounts of aggressive war, military supplies would be cut off. If more aggressive war was waged, even oil would not be traded.
I’d say “the US, Germany and Japan all chose to fight,” and this bare fact is of basically no importance. “Both sides were making overt hostile actions,” is a type of thing that is true whether one country decides to only import product X when its manufacture complies with sufficient environmental and labor protections or one country demands the cession of most of another’s territory on threat of invasion, whether a country wages restricted war by blowing up imports to a country but nothing in the country doing the exporting, or it freezes certain foreign assets suspected of facilitating money laundering.
It is not clear to me that the US would have intervened had Japan attacked the Dutch East Indies or even Australia. If this is true and Japan had thought it likely that the US would not intervene, I think US paticipation could have been avoided.
All chose to fight contingent on certain actions of others, but the same is true of Ghandi “I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence,” and basically every other entity. Each just had different conditions of others before it came to that action from them.
For Germany, if adjacent countries had certain territory and did not surrender it, they would invade. For Japan, they would rather not invade the Allies in the East, but would if the US cut off oil. For the US, if Japan waged sufficient amounts of aggressive war, military supplies would be cut off. If more aggressive war was waged, even oil would not be traded.
I’d say “the US, Germany and Japan all chose to fight,” and this bare fact is of basically no importance. “Both sides were making overt hostile actions,” is a type of thing that is true whether one country decides to only import product X when its manufacture complies with sufficient environmental and labor protections or one country demands the cession of most of another’s territory on threat of invasion, whether a country wages restricted war by blowing up imports to a country but nothing in the country doing the exporting, or it freezes certain foreign assets suspected of facilitating money laundering.