In 1940, the United States placed Japan in a difficult position. Japan was a country with very limited resources. It had to import oil, steel and other goods from other Asian countries and, to some extent, from the United States. To secure access to these resources, it had tried, years earlier, to build an empire. The U.S. used its economic power to block the sale of oil from what we now call Indonesia, to name just one country, and refused to sell steel to Japan. The U.S. feared that a Japanese Empire would threaten U.S. military command of the Pacific, making the homeland vulnerable to Japanese military power.
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