[bpodgursky]

Um, you must also have had a pretty spotty education, because you missed the part where the fuel embargo was to stop the ongoing genocide the Japanese were conducting against China.

Don't act like the world would have been A- ok if we had just been ok selling gas to power genocides.

[mikeash]

It's worth noting that China lost 15-20 million people in the war, which is the second highest death toll of all the involved countries, behind the USSR. And the war in China gets very little attention. If you ask people when WWII started, they'll usually say December 7th 1941 (if they're being US-centric) or September 1 1939 (if they remember Poland). Yet the Japanese had been rampaging around China since the early 30s, with very little done to stop them until they made the mistake of provoking a great power a decade later.

[AnimalMuppet]

Well... the US did stop selling some stuff (steel, rubber, gasoline, and maybe a bit more) to Japan because of what they were doing in China. That was a factor in Japan deciding to go to war with the US.

So I don't know if you count that as "little done to stop them". That was what we could do, short of war, and even that helped precipitate war.