[Jamie79SC]

The US was in direct competition with Japan for access to oil, rubber, and tin. Our efforts to limit their access to these critical resources put us on an almost inevitable course toward war.

Now you can correctly argue that 1930s Japan was a brutal, imperialistic dictatorship that had evil designs on a wide swath of the Pacific, but if we had stayed in our shell, the main effect on the US would have been limited access to rubber and tin (we had plenty of oil at the time). First and foremost, it was US commercial interest that lead to our aggressive policy in the Pacific in general and toward Japan in particular.