I'm handing out some free red pills on this "infamous" 80th anniversary:
-FDR was informed about the attack on Pearl Harbor well in advance but just let it happen because he was in bed with Stalin, and he'd let his whole state apparatus get infested with hordes of commie roaches. Conveniently, all the most important assets like aircraft carriers were off on a training exercise that day. He repeatedly snubbed requests from Japanese diplomats for a meeting in the preceding days.
-Japan definitely overplayed their hand, it must be said. Who knows what political landscape we'd be living in if they'd simply declared an end to their imperial ambitions and settled for the territories they held at the time.
-The atomic bombs had basically nothing to do with Japan's surrender years later. The US had already razed 58 large cities with plain old fire over the summer of '45. What difference would razing 2 more cities with special fire that also causes cancer make in that situation? Japan surrendered because Stalin declared war and threatened their western border while they were entirely deployed in the south and east. All they were hoping for was something better than an unconditional surrender. Good thing they sided with US.
-WWII was nothing like the comfy morality tale they sell normies in high school.
-At least we got anime, which is now one of the last remaining beacons of western civilization.
Edit: I'm glad this generated some friction. My mind isn't changed, but my thanks to everyone who brought differing opinions.
Counterfactuals are always hard to answer, and even harder to decide if they are reasonable. The US was demanding that Japan withdraw from China - failure to do which was what led to the oil embargo on Japan. Just stopping further conquests would not have cut it. In retrospect, it would have been quite smart (even after the war with the US started), because the war in China was tying up a lot of resources and manpower, but hindsight is 20/20.
I have wondered what would have happened if Japan had only attacked the European empires and not the US.
Quite unlikely. The only reasonable prospect was an intervention by Japan to attack the USSR in the east. But because of its losses in earlier skirmishes with the USSR, it never dared, and made a treaty with the USSR - which freed up vital Siberian legions which stopped the German onslaught.