I can't really agree with you there, Don. FDR did deliberately maneuver the Japanese into a trade embargo where it was absolutely inevitable that they would attack the USA, only question was where and exactly when. I don't think the Americans regarded Pearl Harbour as a very likely target...it was just too far away from Japanese bases. No one had ever mounted a carrier raid over such a vast distance before, and the Allies grossly underestimated Japan's naval expertise before that war started!

The raid on Pear did not "pretty much wipe out the US fleet" at Pearl, because they missed the all-important aircraft carriers...the one class of ship that was decisive in the Pacific naval war, as the Japanese had just so amply demonstrated.*

(*before someone else says it, submarines also proved decisive...American submarines, that is...they had almost totally obliterated the Japanese merchant marine by the end of 1944)

The old battleships that the Japanese nailed at Pearl really didn't matter much one way or another...except in a psychological sense...they were the old symbols of ocean power in people's minds at the time. But they were too slow to escort aircraft carriers and good for nothing much else except reducing island strongholds by bombardment or fighting other old battleships (this happened only once...at Leyte Gulf in 1944...and 2 old Japanese battleships, Fuso and Yamashiro were sunk in a night battle by 5 or 6 old American battleships).

The ships that mattered...tremendously...were the aircraft carriers Enterprise, Yorktown, Lexington, Saratoga, and Wasp. None of them were at Pearl Harbour when the Japanese raid hit, but three of them could easily have been. The Americans got lucky, cos they just happened to all be out cruising at the time. The Japanese would have sunk the lot if they'd been in harbour...and THEN the US Pacific fleet would indeed have been crippled, and the west coast in some real danger.

While I agree that FDR made trade moves to provoke a war, I can see why he did, given the international situation. War was in fact becoming inevitable, but he moved the clock forward some by depriving Japan of their sources of steel and oil. He could be either lauded or criticized for having done so, depending on whether you had decided to like him or not in the first place... :-) If you hate Democrats, you will not like FDR.

What I'm saying is, yeah, he got the USA into that war...and yeah, he had a number of rather understandable reasons for doing so. His main concern was Nazi Germany. He did not want the Germans to win the war. Hitler made FDR's job easier by declaring war on the USA very shortly after Pearl Harbour. He could have done nothing more agreeable, from FDR's point of view! It's ironical. Hitler was a very strange fellow, in the grip of his own violent emotions. FDR was a much cooler player, who calculated the odds wisely and carefully before making his move.

As for the Japanese, they had been backed into a corner. They could either fight the USA and Britain (and almost certainly lose) or not fight and be relegated to the status of a disempowered has-been in the Pacific. That they chose to fight was inevitable. It had all the tragic markings of a classic Shakespearian tragedy...Japan being the murderous MacBeth, doomed to a bitter end by his own violent crimes (against, in this case, China).