Why the United States still joins a Far Eastern war

Washington could not let Britain and France defeat Japan alone and dominate the postwar settlement in a region the United States considered strategically important. A Japanese attack on French or British Asian possessions would therefore still draw American intervention even without a Pearl Harbor-first sequence. American ships might have to enter an existing Allied command because the Anglo-French fleet would already be organized in theater. That reversal creates difficult coalition diplomacy and reduces the automatic assumption of American operational dominance.